Content marketing: What is it and how it benefits your business

Content marketing is currently considered in digital marketing to be perhaps the most popular strategy for approaching potential customers and building a long and beneficial relationship with them.

After all, indirect advertising is now considered more effective than direct advertising, mainly because of the way users positively interact with brands.

What is content marketing and how can it help a business? In the following article you will read everything you need to know.

Content marketing – What is it

If we were to give a definition to content marketing, we would say it is the process of designing, creating, distributing, sharing and publishing content through various means such as social media, blogs, podcasts, guest posts and more.

The goal of content marketing is to reach your target group, increase brand recognition, loyalty and ultimately, sales.

Basic forms of content 

There are several types of content that are part of content marketing and can help you achieve your goals:

• Social Media Content: With so many social media platforms and billions of users around the world, promoting social media is an integral part of any digital marketing strategy.
  Content marketing includes the publication of videos, live broadcasts, photos, stories and articles depending on the audience and the characteristics of each platform.
• Infographics: Infographics have become very popular in recent years as they combine written information and images in a comprehensible, graphic format.
  Creating such content works very well when a complex topic is summarized in terms of its basic elements, so that it can be easily understood.
• Blog posts: Website design now includes to a significant extent the creation of a blog on the site, so that its owner can upload interesting articles on the field in which he operates.
• These articles can then be published as links on social media, but also by optimizing them with SEO techniques to bring direct visitors to the site through organic results.
• Podcasts: Audio podcasts have become very popular worldwide and recently in Greece as a means of communication, allowing great creativity.
  Podcasts can cover any topic of your choice in one or more episodes, with many participants and variety in duration.
• Videos: Videos are also a big part of content creation, which depending on the characteristics of the brand can be humorous, informative, inside stories from the company, the construction of its products, useful, consulting, etc.
  These videos are usually uploaded to your YouTube channel, but can also be posted elsewhere, such as on social media or on the site's blog.

Advantages of content marketing

Content marketing with content creation of high quality and relevance to your subject and the expectations of your target group has many and remarkable advantages, as it helps you to:

• Inform your potential customers about the products and services you offer.
• Build a relationship of trust and sympathy with your audience, something that leads to higher loyalty and ultimately, sales.
• Show your audience how your products and services provide solutions to their problems.
• Create a sense of community around your brand.

Content marketing – Examples

To better understand what content marketing is, some representative examples can help.

Suppose we have an e-commerce business, which operates in the field of selling healthy products, snacks, food, sweets, etc.

An effective content marketing strategy would include articles, which would be explanatory on what the brand offers, with topics such as:

What are the advantages of X health product, recipes for healthy sweets, benefits of healthy eating, well-being suggestions etc.

These articles could be published on the eshop’s blog, but also as guest posts on various websites in the healthy lifestyle field .

Videos and podcasts, in which a specialist (eg nutritionist) would give healthy eating tips, could have a similar theme.

In social media, posts could be made  with recipes that one can prepare with the above ingredients or stories with videos that will show the process of making healthy snacks.

A corresponding structure in content creation can be followed by an e-shop with technological gadgets.

Which can put an emphasis on educating the target audience on the usefulness of each technological innovation and what the user should pay attention to in each market.

Thus, the products of the company and the features that make them unique are not advertised in a direct way, but are perceived through a deeper understanding by the user.

What a content strategy can contain

The successful strategy for creating and distributing content includes specific steps that ensure its efficiency and suitability for a specific target group.

Research the needs of your audience - Buyer persona

The first step in creating quality content is having a good understanding of who you are addressing.

This includes creating a specific character that brings together all the characteristics of your target audience.

That is, a buyer persona with a specific name, social and economic characteristics, desires, problems and interests.

The inspiration for this hypothetical customer comes from real people who are already your customers but also from customers you want to reach in the future.

This strategy leads to the creation of content that meets specific needs, while at the same time creating a link between the brand and the audience.

 Setting goals

Once you have defined your buyer persona, you need to define the strategic goals and metrics you will use to measure the effectiveness of the content marketing campaign.

Such goals may be:

Increasing traffic or sales, educating the market on what you offer, brand recognition, creating value that will be associated with it, greater audience engagement or reducing customer acquisition costs.

Once you know your goals, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, so you can decide in time if a strategy is effective or needs to change.

Creating consistent and valuable content

The goal is for the content you create to be consistent and valuable.

This means that it should have stability and uniformity.

Efficient copywriting that will create a specific brand voice for this content is very important here.

Representing the values ​​of the brand and giving solutions to the problems of the target group are the main goals that you must have in mind.

And of course, this content should be unique, add value, and not repetitive (or worse, duplicate) with your competitors' related content.

Distribution of the Content

Distribution has to do with how you choose to promote it. Content can be published on various channels, such as:

• on the company's social media, where paid promotions can be made for the most effective promotion of posts
• via email marketing
• on blogs and websites with optimized content for search engines

The goal is to promote this content, as you would your own products.

This way, your audience will have access to it through various channels and you will have the spectacular benefits of content marketing in promoting websites.

Conclusions

In conclusion, content marketing is a very effective way to reach your audience, focusing on their needs and without aggressively pushing for immediate sales.

Instead, you indirectly show them what you can offer him and thus you gain their affection and ultimately more sales.

Want to know more about how the content marketing strategy implemented by Wizard can grow your business? Contact us. We will be happy to find solutions to your business needs.