Digital Marketing for Your Business: What to Know
Is your traditional marketing such as a banner ad or TV ad not getting the desired result? If so, it is time to switch to digital marketing that can drive promising results for your business.
It is fast, cost-effective, interactive, and gives you wider access to your audience. This form of marketing connects your business with people and turns them into your customer.
And there is a good reason why digital marketing can make your business successful.
According to one study, nearly 70-80% of customers search for products or services online and this also includes the research part. This fact might have given you an idea of the steep rise of online activities over the past few years. If you are not online, you are sure to miss out on thousands of potential customers over there.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to any online marketing that is done through the internet using equipment like a desktop computer, mobile phones, and other digital media to promote products and services. Simply put, it is a type of marketing to promote or sell products or services over the Internet. Some of the commonly used forms of digital marketing are SEO, PPC, social media marketing, and sharing content like blogs and videos. Or you can say that digital marketing is an umbrella term for all these forms.
The overall aim of digital marketing is to connect your business with the right audience at the right place and at the right time.
Why Digital Marketing is as Important as Your Business Itself?
Digital marketing is not just creating Facebook pages or sharing images on Instagram what most businesses believe. Rather, it is a powerful method you can promote your business to gain the attention of potential customers.
Forget for a while that you are a business. Instead, slip into the shoes of a customer. How would you search for a hotel nearby?
Obviously, you are likely to search it on the Internet using your smartphone. Right? Well, most customers do the same.
No wonder over 90% of people search online for the services or products they want. Based on this, here are some convincing facts to switch to digital marketing for your business.
Therefore, it is for sure that having an online presence is quite beneficial for your business.
THE CORE COMPONENTS OF ONLINE MARKETING
Website Designing:
Website is the face of your business over the Internet. While you can still run your business online by listing it on Yellow Page, a website will make your business look more credible, more professional. Its appearance, color, design, and even content can affect the way your customers perceive your brand. Therefore, make sure your website reflects your brand style and personality. It is a vital extension of your business.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
After creating a website, you need to make sure you appear in the searches of your user for the products or services you offer. When your potential customer is searching for a product or service online, they are likely to Google it first. To be found among millions of search results, your website should be optimized for the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This is where search engine optimization or SEO comes in.
SEO is the process of enhancing the visibility of a website and makes sure that it appears within the top search results whenever someone uses the targeted keyword or key phrases in the search bar.
Keywords:
Basically, keywords are the search terms used by customers to search over the Internet. If your website or content includes those search phrases, chances are you can appear in the search results for queries. Therefore, you need to choose the right keywords mostly used by your target audience.
These keywords can then be incorporated into metatags, listings, page descriptions, and blogs.
Optimization of On-Page and Off-Page:
On-page and off-page optimization are the two important components of digital marketing. An on-page optimization generally includes keywords optimization, content creation, sitemap creation, Google guidelines, and browser compatibility. Off-page optimization is done on the outer platforms to give back a link to the website.
Blogging:
You can write blogs about anything relevant to your target audience. If you are a healthcare business, you can write about healthy habits, disease prevention, and anything that can intrigue your audience. Having a dedicated section for blogs will not help you share information or educate people, but also let your audience share their views with you. Furthermore, these blogs can be incorporated with keywords, internal linking, and social media buttons, making them easily searchable.
Sending Promotional Emails:
Newsletter marketing can help you deliver offers, promotions, and updates to your customers’ inboxes. However, you need to create a visually appealing newsletter with the strategic placement of the information. These newsletters are sent to your subscribers or potential customers.
Social Media Marketing:
Everyone is on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can use these platforms to reach your potential customers to build your brand and increase sales. That’s why social media is an important part of online marketing. Social media marketing involves the activities like posting text and images, videos, and other content that can boost audience engagement.
Pay Per Click Advertising:
Pay Per Click or PPC refers to the online paid ad services where you only pay each time your ad is clicked, hence the name “pay per click”. It often appears on the top of the search results. It has become one of the fastest digital marketing strategies to drive traffic and conversion growth.
Content Marketing:
One of the core components of digital marketing is content marketing. It is a marketing approach focused on generating and sharing valuable and relevant content to drive customer engagement. The content can be articles, blog posts, email newsletters, case studies, videos, webinars, e-books, and much, much more.
HOW ONLINE MARKETING HELPS YOU GET AN EDGE
Engaging the Customer at Every Stage:
Before online marketing became a norm, not many businesses were focused on the customer journey, mainly because it was challenging to understand and analyze. Generally, a customer would visit a retail store after getting influenced by an ad on TV or in the newspaper, and buy the product. However, in digital marketing, it is easy to track every step that a customer takes, often from the moment when they exploring the products at your website.
Nowadays, it is common to see an ad online, search and compare prices on different websites, then visit a store or online store to buy the product. Mobile apps lure customers by giving special offers and coupons, comparison tools, and customer tools, which improves marketers’ understanding of the buying process. Digital marketing helps a marketer to track the entre buying journey of the customer.
Targeting the Right Audience:
The classification of the audiences has become easier as several digital marketing tools let you focus on particular audiences. These tools have the features to track online activities and demographic information. Digital marketers can utilize these insights to create specific products or services that can meet their (audience) interests. For example, once a user clicks on your online display ad, whether on Facebook or through Google, the brand can target that user with relevant ads. If a user receives content tailored to their requirements, they are likely to shop it.
With digital marketing, content and offers can be created according to the buying journey. For instance, email marketing can be utilized to nurture a lead unless they are ready to buy a product. Perhaps they subscribed to the blog and consistently explore your blog update emails. After some months, they check out about me and service pages. At this point, you can send them a targeted email with a luring offer. They click on the offer and ask for a quote. Advanced online marketing tools make this possible. When a user fills out a form, he or she provides information like age, occupation, etc. Most web pages have cookies to track the visitor’s behavior on the page. Based on this data, you can create the right strategies according to their needs.
Being Cost-Effective:
Digital marketing is less expensive compared to traditional marketing such as print and TV. It saves you money and earns more leads in the long run. With conventional marketing methods, it is challenging for small size businesses to compete with their larger counterparts. After all, large enterprises are likely to afford TV ads, radio spots, and banner advertising. That’s why it is not easy for small businesses to take on their bigger rivals.
Digital marketing, however, lets you compete in the same battleground. It is a cost-effective way to promote your businesses to the interested audience. Many digital marketing and advertising methods are cheaper. For instance, pay-per-click or PPC advertising lets you chose your budget. Whether you want to spend $100 or $500, you set the budget that can work for your business. This is a great benefit of digital marketing. Or it will cost nothing to list your business online on Google My Business.
To conclude, digital marketing costs you less while gaining more.
Getting You in the Local Searches:
Over 40% of all Google searches are local, meaning that more users are likely to search for the nearest shops or stores. Therefore, it is important to have a solid online presence to appear in your user searches. You can get started by listing your business on Google My Business.
Providing Better Customer Service:
Customer support is an important part of your business. You can have a certain form of customer support on your website. Apart from that, your social media accounts also act as a customer care cell where they can drop their queries online. While it ensures an ultimate convenience to the customers, you can give them a quick response. A win-win situation!
Helping Build Customer Loyalty:
With digital marketing, it is easier to build customer loyalty. For example, you can get little personal with people using social media platforms by running a certain campaign. You can invite them to send their experience with your product or services.
Creating Hype for Offer and Promotion:
Whether it’s a coupon or a seasonal sale, you can take your ongoing sale or promotion to more people using digital marketing. What about announcing it through social media?
Are You Ready to Maximise Your Business Success with Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is a wonderful opportunity for your business to gain more leads and sales. You can invest in different forms of online marketing such as PPC and SEO. You can talk to a marketing consultant now to choose the right digital marketing services for your business.
Which Type of Content Marketing is Best for Your Business?
Creating content might sound fairly easy, but the truth is that choosing the right content type is overwhelming and stressful. What has worked for one brand or audience might not work for another. Top of that, it is not easy to decide which ones to use and which ones will be a statement. With so many forms of content available, it can be challenging to narrow down the choices and finding the right solution for your business.
Apart from considering the needs of your audience, you have to build different types of content to engage with them at the different stages of the buyer journey.
To make it easy for you, here is a rundown of important content marketing types to get started.
Blogs:
Blogging is the most used form of content marketing, especially for small businesses.
They have been a traditional way to enhance SEO and boost more traffic to your website from search engines. This can help marketers to achieve the most with their limited budget by integrating any advertising with inbound marketing tactics.
Forbes has found that websites that have a blog generally have over 400% more indexed pages than those that don’t. It simply means that the websites that have blogs have better chances to be on the first page of search engines like Google when prospective customers search for relevant keywords.
Moreover, websites with blogs have more than 90% inbound links, which also helps improve SEO.
Not only does blogging enhance your SEO, but it is also an efficient way to build a relationship with your potential and existing customers.
However, it requires you to provide more valuable forms of content. Make sure your blogs address the key issues of your target audience and present solutions accordingly. Great content inspires people to buy from you.
Blogs are tried and tested ways to provide value through short-form kind of content.
If you are looking to incorporate blogs in your content marketing and scale your business, make sure to have a strategy that includes which topics you are looking to cover in your blog.
Keyword research is important to see what phrases are used by the consumers in the search engines to find services like yours. Then, ponder over the relevant topics or questions and create blog content around these topics.
Videos:
More and more people are watching video content. No wonder why one-third of all online activity is spent viewing video content, establishing the video as one of the effective types of content marketing.
Video is a great content marketing tool to boost brand awareness and increase customer engagement.
For example, providing a video testimonial of a client is more powerful than its textual counterpart.
Similarly, showing an unboxing video of your product can generate more views than a blog. Instructional or how-to videos are more effective when it comes to showing how to use your product.
According to one study, brands that use videos are likely to see over 150% more organic traffic from search engines. Moreover, videos can also increase time spent on site by 105%.
The more time your target audience spends on your website, the greater you have chances to convert them into customers.
Here are some more interesting statistics for using video content:
- Increasing social shares by 1200%
- More consumers prefer to watch a video about a product first before buying it.
- Landing pages with video content can see up to an 80% increase in their conversion.
Infographics:
If you don’t have a sufficient budget for video marketing, you can try this cheap yet effective form of content.
Infographics have become more valuable than ever before as today’s visitor needs information quickly. They might not read your lengthy blog posts or watch a 5-minute video.
Although it might not be as powerful as videos, it gives information in a snappier and engaging way. It helps you educated your audiences and provide useful information that can add value to your prospective or existing customers.
This visual content marketing format helps your target audience better digest data such as statistics and scientific explanation.
However, it is important to make your infographics visually appealing as well as informative. And it is equally important to make sure that the information is easy to understand. Infographics are great when it comes to explaining a complicated subject or presenting statistics.
Case Studies:
Another useful type of content marketing is a case study. Gone are the days when case studies were used to be black and white data created and used by researchers only. Modern-day marketing has realized the value of case studies.
Case studies are generally customer stories that explain how your business has helped a specific customer.
For example, a digital marketing company can create a case study to show how their SEO strategy improved the traffic of their specific client. You can also highlight your special services or product in a case study.
A case study is an efficient content strategy as it can help them understand how your business can help them.
While you can include the general applications or uses of your product or services, a real-life example is often more effective as it can help you build trust with new leads.
Case studies can be published on your website, but you may also use them in your blogs, eBooks, social posts, and other content types. Your sales team can use them while approaching the leads.
eBooks:
If you have never used an eBook before, think of them as detailed blog content spanning 2000-2500 words.
However, they shouldn’t be treated as a non-fictional novel or a multiple-page ad for your business.
Rather, they aim to provide valuable information to your client.
For marketers, an eBook is a great opportunity to highlight their expertise, improve their reputation, and above all, generate leads.
It is a great way to build a relationship with the target audience so that they can trust your brand and contact you when they are about to make a purchase.
eBooks are also counted among the best content marketing forms to collect lead information.
This is because a visitor is required to provide some type of information to download an eBook, thereby adding them to your email list. This information can be used to create a better marketing strategy.
To get started, you can choose a topic that matches the needs of your customers. For example, you can write about the best online marketing tips for small businesses. The next step is to choose the right visuals, color, and graphics. Afterward, you need to promote it.
User-Generated Content:
User-generated content, as the name suggests, is created by a user. It can be any form of content, such as videos, text, audio, images, or anything that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media.
And it is an amazing content marketing method for many reasons. First of all, it serves as an effective social proof. Seeing content from real customers can improve your credibility. After all, real people sound trustable than marketers.
For example, one of your customers has posted his experience about using your teabags on Instagram. Or you can ask your loyal customers to upload pictures of them using your tea brand on social media.
When Coca-Cola launched their personalized coke bottles with customers’ names on them, the company asked the customers to share pictures of them enjoying a drink with their personalized coke bottle on social media.
And this has turned the Coke’s customers into the advertisers of the company.
Social Media Posts:
Social media can help you reach your target audience. Some platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook can increase your outreach as well as build relationships with customers.
The content of your social media posts plays a vital role in how your company interacts with prospects and existing customers. How you use social media as part of your content marketing strategy is determined by your goals.
Social media posts can be used to improve the visibility of your brand, notify customers about sales and promotions and provide leads and additional information about your products.
The Bottom Line:
While you should try to incorporate all these content marketing strategies, you have to choose a format that can work best for your target audience.
In other words, you need to choose the type that can fit your business the best.
For example, if you are a clothing business, only using a blog might not really make much sense. But using videos and images for imparting styling tips is engaging. On the other hand, if you are educating people on how to cook, providing written recipes in the form of blogs can work. If your audience spends a lot of time on YouTube, then video is your go-to marketing method.
The point is here to determine the right content marketing type for your business. You can then incorporate your preferred content marketing methods with other types.
What do you think? Let us know by commenting below!
How To Improve B2B Content Marketing?
92% of B2B marketing leaders claim that content plays a critical role in the decision-making process. Whether it is the beginning of a new year or a fresh quarter, trends begin to change and goals start to reset. This is all the more relevant for content marketers. B2B content marketing offers a thousand choices to improve on your project, unfortunately, only a few stand a chance to ace and give exceptional results.
Take a look at the tips on how to improve B2B Content marketing –
- Experiment with a variety of B2B Content marketing formats
61% of content professionals are challenged with knowing what is most important to their audiences. The way we see it, the target audience could be in thousands, however, the preferences could be in millions. Content could be created in a case study or webinar format. Therefore, test a variety of formats to improve engagement.
- Give time to content strategy
High-quality content goes hand in hand with correct strategy development (and adjustment). One must evaluate its strength and creative intelligibility. Know if your ideas are well received and organized well.
- Marketing should be for the audience
Unlike the standard concept surrounding B2B content marketing, it should be about bringing solutions to your target audience than promoting your services and products. You must focus on creating content that accommodates your audience’s preferences. Some might prefer Infographics with stats and charts other might like a light-hearted blog post.
- Consider the different stages of the sales funnel
You would be highly mistaken if you think that direct and active selling is the best way to generate leads in the B2B space. The most effective way is by creating content that attracts your readers to your services or inbound marketing like social media, search engine optimization, and blogging. Each of these platforms is targeted towards people at different stages of the sales funnel.
- Keyword Research
Keyword research is the best way to understand the business. It is only through keyword research you get access to vital information. Apart from the standard yet biggest use- ranking, it will help you phrase your content correctly. Also, it will help you with generating more content ideas.
- Pareto Principle
According to Pareto Principle i.e. the 80/20 rule means that 80% of your content should entertain, enlighten, and inform your audience while only 20%should directly promote your services or products. Unfortunately not all content campaigns excel at the Pareto principle. This implies that lots of businesses are not investing correctly in B2B content marketing strategies. B2B marketers must frame their content strategy according to this principle so that there is high promotional potential in the content itself.
- Testimonials
Most businesses forget that even in B2B there should be a connection formed with individuals and potential buyers. You must be able to tell how your brand or product will affect the buyers. This is possible through client stories and testimonials. Testimonials would prove to be profitable for all industries and sectors. Client stories would mean less guesswork and confusion about how your services and business would seem ideal for the client.
- Launch campaigns
The best way to attract an audience is to show your presence and stand out. This implies sharing tricks and tips in a particular niche industry, specifically your clientele’s. For instance, if you are in the marketing department, launch a campaign to teach your readers how to increase sales and grow their businesses. Make sure to include marketing ideas, tips, standard how-to and know (how and who), etc.
- Competitive review
Reviewing your competitors’ B2B content marketing strategy is not solely about comparisons. It’s a great approach to assess industry standards and trends with respect to B2B content marketing strategy. Take a good look at their platforms, content types, and formats. Do they have a theme? Are they following a pattern or setting one? This would certainly help you weigh up your content marketing strategy.
All in all, these strategic tips mentioned above would help you improve B2B content marketing. What do you think? Let us know by sharing your views in the comment section given below.
Why is Content Marketing Important for B2B?
When you think about B2B marketing, sometimes you may forget that you are still engaging people who use search engines such as Google. These are the same people who use search engines to discover a given topic or news, locate the closest location of a particular store, check the score of various games, or get information.
It is crucial to understand that B2B buyers are looking for information on services or products online, just like other customers. Also, consider that less than 20 percent of all companies and businesses think of legacy relationships as a factor when they purchase services and products for their enterprise digitally. According to Content Marketing Institute‘s 2021 report, just 43% of successful B2B marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. B2B technology and software marketers have to ensure that the services and products of their brand are easily visible online. To achieve this, you need to focus on establishing a strong and robust content marketing strategy.
What Is B2B Content Marketing?
B2B content marketing is simply defined as the process of using content to expand the target audience of your audience, develop and strengthen brand affinity, and finally drive sales and leads by engaging other businesses. The major difference between B2B content marketing and other forms is that it is specifically for businesses. It doesn’t deal with consumer-facing content.
How is B2B Content Marketing Different from B2C Content Marketing?
B2B content needs to be completely useful above all else. Your primary target is to ensure that your readers can recognize the actionable elements of your content. Your target audience needs to identify what needs to be done as a business. It does not mean that you need to publish only relevant business-related content. Some 49% of companies outsource their content marketing because they don’t have the time, expertise, or resources to manage their strategy in-house. You can outsource your content marketing strategies and come up with a wide range of on-demand talent to help you produce your content. This means that you get curated content without having to worry about the technicalities that go into developing it.
You can put some odd interesting off-topic pieces now and then, but a B2B content marketing strategy demands that your brand be seen as a leading and renowned resource for professionals. Not only will it help in expanding your clientele, but it enables you to gain a monopoly in your industry. Of course, this does not mean that B2C content cannot be professional, useful, and to the point, but it is not the primary factor.
Benefits of B2B Content Marketing
Showcase Your Intricate Services or Products in a Digestible Manner
B2B content marketing lets you showcase your intricate services or products on your website. Most websites have very little content in their fundamental products and services. While the services and products pages are very necessary but they also need to be the starting point where the B2B content marketing strategy begins. Each product and service on your website is committed to the pages of your website, and the associated keywords add up to help clients seeing the bigger picture.
If you are thinking about expanding your business beyond just a services page or a sales-heavy product, you should start by researching what it is that your customers are exactly looking for. You need to understand your prospects and customers. To achieve this, you can create buyer personas, interviews, conduct keyword research that correlates web searches to your customers, and interact with your clients through social media.
Once you start understanding your target audience in and out, you can start by creating relevant whitepapers, videos, webinars, infographics, blog posts, among others. All the content you showcase needs to break down each benefit of your services and products in more significant and more targeted details.
You Can Target Particular Segments of Your Target Audience
When you opt for a B2B content marketing strategy to showcase your services and products, you need to understand what your buyers need. Their needs and requirements depend on their location, industry, and size of the organization. These factors will help you create a dynamic and versatile target audience profile. This means that your services will be better served with a B2B content marketing strategy that provides different offerings for a multitude of buyers.
Content marketing helps businesses in initiating a conversation with a plethora of clients on a granular level. Forrester reports that 92 percent of B2B purchases start with search, and B2B buyers are demanding personalized experiences. You can use a B2B content marketing strategy in creating collateral that helps your business in appealing to specific segments of your target audience. This will help you in showing your prospective clientele that your organization is familiar with the complexities of the business world and aims to create effective and practical solutions that are scalable and customizable.
Achieve Enhanced Search Engine Visibility for Numerous Keyword Targets
You can use B2B content marketing strategies to enhance the visibility of your business. Your products and services will most probably focus on a specific area. For example, let’s say that your company deals with marketing automation software mainly. This means that you will build your website around marketing automation. “Marketing automation” will be the core keyword of your website. In this case, this keyword provides you with a solid starting point. As you keep advancing your B2B content marketing strategy, it is essential to focus on creating content that can be consumed by customers. Your content needs to be engaging for your prospects who might be looking for a solution in your industry. By designing your content around the problems you are trying to solve, you can offer more specified solutions. This also provides you a great way to use different keywords and phrases that can help your customers in discovering your website.
You can also try a number of combinations that are related to the central topic of your website. For instance, if you search for keywords and popular phrases related to marketing automation, you will find “what is marketing automation.” You can also see that this phrase has nearly 1000 searches every month. This means that by incorporating this phrase on your website, you are adding content that answers this question. However, if you don’t add any relevant content on your website that deals with this question, you are essentially missing out on a lot of opportunities that can drive your brand awareness. This can also help in generating leads and boosting future sales.
Capture and Generate Useful and High-Quality Leads
The final goal of any organization is to generate revenue and to build profits. To be profitable, all your marketing efforts need to be directed towards engaging prospective clients. Your efforts and actions, such as B2B content marketing strategies, need to generate leads that can offer you real business opportunities. At the beginning of your B2B content marketing strategy, it is essential that you create different kinds of content. Some of these can be case studies, reports, blogs, etc., and determine what appeals to your target audience. Once you grab the attention of your audience, your content needs to engage with the readers and motivate them to take action. You will define what the end goal of your B2B content marketing strategy is. This end goal will determine what action you want your clients to take after engaging with your content. This action may be requesting a quote, call-to-action button, or to sign up on a contact form.
When you start by creating your assets, such as content, you will think about various ways in which you can “pull-in” leads. For instance, when you create free content marketing assets such as case studies, blogs, you can also think about placing some of the more extensive assets behind certain lead generation forms. Once you get this content, you can link it to various relevant sections across your website. You can also place these forms at the bottom of pages that are popular and get heavy traffic. This will enable your audience to quickly navigate to relevant sections and take action just after they have consumed some relevant content.
Once you start to understand what drives your most qualified leads, you can use this data to refine your B2B content marketing strategies. This will help you in finally coming up with a strategy that is very effective for your target audience and convert more and more prospective customers into paying clients.
Conclusion
B2B Content Marketing is an excellent way for businesses to generate valuable leads. By incorporating this into your existing marketing strategy, you can enhance the overall experience of your target audience. Ideally, you should start by defining the B2B content marketing strategy that you need for your business and develop relevant content to pitch your services and products. It would help if you also focused on incorporating popular keywords and other marketing techniques to enhance the visibility of your website. Once your marketing strategy is in place, you need to keep an eye on how each section of your website is performing, which sections are getting the most traffic, and keep refining your strategies as you go.
What is Content Marketing?
These days, traditional, outbound marketing strategies are not as effective in converting your audience as they used to be. Outbound marketing strategies are anything that interrupts your audience in order to resonate with them.
42% of B2B marketers say they’re effective at content marketing. Nowadays, there is a shift in the trends of reaching your audience. Target audience is known to feel more partial towards inbound marketing strategies. A popular inbound marketing strategy is to create a narrative for your audience. Brands that use content to tell a story ensure that their content is engaging, authentic, and tailor-made for their audience. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs. 2.5%)
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing stands for an extensive process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content for your target audience. Content marketing has been known to boost factors such as audience loyalty, interactions, reach, sales, and brand awareness. Quality content is primarily needed in all forms of marketing. We are moving towards a highly digitized age where sound content marketing strategies are a necessity in this era. 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing can help your organization achieve the following goals:
- Educating your prospects and leads about the services and products you offer
- Boost your conversion rates
- Build long-term relationships with your business and customers that result in enhanced loyalty
- Show your target audience how your services and products can solve the challenges they face in your field of expertise
- Creating a sense of community for your brand with a loyal audience
Types of Content Marketing
There are numerous types of content marketing strategies that you may incorporate into your brand. Some of the most common ones are:
Social Media
There are over 3.6 billion global social media users. It doesn’t come as a surprise that businesses choose to market their content on social media. Platforms such as Snapchat, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, can help you create and share various kinds of content easily, such as images, videos, stories, polls, and blogs.
Infographic
Infographics are a data type that helps you share content, data, and information in a graphic and easy-to-understand format. With a mixture of clear words, brief statements, and simple images, Infographics are a very popular way to communicate your content effectively. Infographics can help you distill down a complex or educational topic for all audience members to understand. Generally, Infographics are vertically long graphics that include tables, graphs, charts and statistics, and images.
Blog
Blogs are a predominant type of inbound content. They help you add creativity in terms of their topic and purpose. With a simple blog, you can quickly promote other external and internal content, other blog articles using social share buttons, links and integrate product information. 57% of marketers reported custom content was their top marketing priority for 2014. In fact, 78% of consumers will trust your brand if you create more customized content.
According to “The State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report by SEMRUSH”, 92 percent of global content marketing was based on blogs. Businesses using blogs have received about 95 percent more links to their website and have over 400 percent more pages indexed by search engines. Also, blogs are a highly cost-effective way of attracting customers through marketing as blogs require smaller teams and smaller budgets to reach out to the target audience.
Podcast
A 2020 survey found that 49% of 12-to-32-year-olds in the U.S. had listened to a podcast within the last month, with an average of six listening hours a week. This study justifies the fact that numerous media outlets and businesses are now creating and sharing their podcasts. While podcasts haven’t penetrated as much market as blogs and video content has, they are still lucrative for many individuals from the business and digital marketing communities. Podcasts support a lot of creativity in terms of the topic of choice. You can also determine other factors associated with the podcast, like the length of the episodes, the platforms that will advertise your podcast, the guest speaker, and the cadence of episodes. A well-planned podcast series can be created quickly and gain a massive reach if distributed through popular podcast networks.
Video
According to Wyzowl’s research, 69% of consumers say they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or service through video. Video marketing can also help your brand build a relationship with the audience members, improve ROI, and boost conversions. You can choose to share your video content on your website, the website of a co-marketer, landing pages, or various social media platforms. Although videos can be time-consuming and expensive to create, they have a high engagement rate with the viewers and generally leaves them asking for more content.
Paid Ads
Paid ads can boost the audience of your business. They are a great way of marketing that helps you in positioning yourself precisely to all the platforms you want your content to be seen. Paid ads can be especially beneficial when they are paired with other kinds of inbound marketing. There are many platforms that allow you to share paid ads, such as on sponsored content, banners, landing pages, and social media.
Why should you opt for content marketing?
A typical customer buying cycle to convert your target audience into a customer consists of primarily four steps:
- Awareness
- Research
- Consideration
- Buying
Traditional or outbound forms of marketing can help you manage the consideration and buying parts of the cycle. However, to tap into the awareness and research stages, you need to employ inbound marketing strategies such as content marketing.
Inbound marketing strategies are known to allow you to put the information out there. You can provide detailed insights and information to your prospective customers, essentially building your brand’s image online. When you make use of this form of marketing where you control what your audience knows about your products, your target audience starts to look for you. In such cases, you don’t require a high-pressure sales tactic for your business.
Content marketing can also support your existing digital marketing strategy positively by providing engaging content. You can use content in different forms to engage your target audience on multiple platforms in synchronization to maximize your ROI.
The role of SEO in Content Marketing
SEO or search engine optimization works in sync with content marketing strategies. This fact is evident by the 7th most asked question on Google in 2020 – “What is content marketing in SEO.”
While search engines are introducing more and more complicated algorithms typically designed to identify and deliver high-quality content to users, there is an increased online competition among content creators. Content creators and marketers need to maximize their efforts to generate and spread valuable and meaningful content into the ever-growing sea of information called the internet. Unique content that is curated with the latest digital marketing techniques needs to be marketed to your target audience to attract customers. Search Engine Optimization or SEO can effectively help in making your content more visible to your prospective audience. SEO is one of the highest performing strategies for content marketing. It helps brands in optimizing the sales cycle of the target audience.
Conclusion
Marketing strategies are continually growing in numbers and types. More and more organizations around the world are leveraging content marketing as a cost-effective way to generate leads, increase ROI and monopolize their industry. Your brand needs to employ a mixture of tools and techniques to help you maximize the immense potential of content marketing. Some skills that you can employ to make your content marketing strategy seamless are editing, research, email marketing, automation, analytics, social media management, and most importantly, SEO.
7 Content Marketing Trends That Will Matter Most in 2021
Gone are the days when content marketing was more like a buzzword, and companies were incorporating it for marketing as an experiment.
Fast forward to 2021, content marketing has become an essential factor in a brand’s marketing strategy.
It has evolved to a proven marketing channel for improving ROI. Content marketing is an inbound online marketing strategy carried out by different content and channels to attract audiences, convert leads, enhance user journeys, and influence conversion.
From blogs, eBooks, info graphics, podcasts, and video marketing, content marketing is a vast field.
It is also important to understand that content marketing has been a dynamic field over the years. The introduction of more engaging forms of content like video marketing has changed the game, meaning that you can’t afford to rely on those text blogs and info-graphics.
Make sure to be well-informed of the latest trends in content marketing.
Keeping this in mind, we propose seven content marketing strategies for 2021.
1. Expertise, Authority, and Trust will Be Rewarded
Google is less likely to reward your content that is built around just keywords. Instead, it focuses on the context and value of your content.
It prefers in-depth expertise in your content over other factors such as keywords or link building.
Gone are the days when back-links were the eminent factors to build authority on the Internet. But now, Google is more concerned about the expertise of the content.
For proof that Google loves content, examine their EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) guidelines.
2. The Rise and Rise of Video and Live Streaming
Unarguably, video is now a top form of media in content marketing. Consider the following statistics:
- Over 2 billion videos are watched a day on Twitter
- Videos make up over 80% of consumer internet traffic.
- 8 billion videos are watched on Facebook a day.
- Social videos generate 1200% more shares than images and text combined.
- Facebook Live posts deliver 170% higher than average engagement over regular posts.
How do you incorporate video into your content marketing strategy if you haven’t done it yet?
Well, you can start by making videos on the usage of your product, customer testimonials, tutorials, and demonstrations. They all benefit your target audience in some way. That’s the main thing.
And, you don’t need a high-end recording studio, either. All you need is a quality camera or Smartphone to get started.
While marketers prefer pre-recorded videos, the momentum is shifting towards live streaming. Users watch live videos three times longer than those that are pre-produced on Facebook. According to LinkedIn, live videos earn 24 times more comments.
3. Personalized Content Continues to Rock
The concept of personalization has been in vogue for the past some years. And it will be on the rise in 2021 and beyond. Personalized content is vital to educate your audience, drive traffic and boost engagement, whether creating sales emails, social media posts, or running contests.
However, in 2021, personalization won’t be all about merely addressing the customers by their name in emails or chat bots. Artificial intelligence solutions such as Siri or Alexa simplify the data analysis, letting you make your content hyper-personalization.
AI technologies can propose ideal email templates for an individual, create content and copy that meet their exact requirements, and make informed content decisions for the future.
For example, AI solutions can help you create the optimized version of your app or website based on your customers’ browsing history and past activity. It will improve the user experience.
It will make all the difference and skyrocket the customer experience.
4. AI and Chatbots to Help with Content Creation
AI and chatbots will have to play a vital role in content creation and delivery. They are all set to change how we generate content, particularly how we interact with the global audience. They are going to be an integral part of the user experience.
What’s more, artificial intelligence will continue to get advanced and help build better-quality content. At least, it can boost the content-creation process by providing valuable insights, sourcing data and references, and delivering authority to everything marketers create.
It is also worth mentioning that Chabot sophistication is advancing. They can now provide data and support marketing campaigns more smoothly.
5. Augmented Reality to Play an Important Role
Augmented Reality or AR has come a long way from a marketing gimmick in its infancy to an efficient inbound marketing tool.
Content marketing and augmented reality can be integrated to guide people to your store, boost user engagement on your website, and maximize your eCommerce success now that augmented reality lets customers try on products virtually.
Moreover, augmented reality can provide some essential context to your content and brand messages, thereby improving the customer experience.
6. Voice Search will Echo in 2021
Another key content marketing trend that you need to consider is voice search. Sure, we know that voice search is on the rise since 2018, but in 2021 and beyond, it will become even more prominent. This is because over 30 percent of the global population is utilizing voice search on their smartphone.
People are supposed to start utilizing voice search predominantly, bringing text searches on the verge of becoming obsolete. However, it won’t happen overnight or in the next five years, but it is important to know that voice search will be a big thing.
With that in mind, one of the critical factors of your 2021 content strategy should be to optimize your content for voice search. Instead of incorporating phrases like “best chocolate cake recipe,” try to use more conversational phrases into your content, such as “how to make the best chocolate cake” or “what are the ingredients for chocolate cake.”
7. The Dominance of Influence Marketing
Here is a basic example to understand influencer marketing:
A buyer is likely to buy your kitchen brand that is being endorsed and recommended to them by someone who has 30K followers over Instagram.
This is because they are to rely on influences or experts more than any other factors. Influencer marketing has been a new form of marketing for brands.
According to one study, over 90% of buyers trust individual recommendations.
The Bottom Line
Content marketing is continuously evolving, and new techniques are being invented all the time.
Today, content marketing covers much more than writing catchy articles and creating attractive infographics.
If you want to take your business to next level in 2021 with content marketing, make sure to follow the trends above.
What do you think? Let us know by commenting below!
What is Brand Activism?
Building Brand Equity by Supporting Progressive Policies
Conservative Dominance
For most of the 20th century, corporations were conservative. They only recognized one stakeholder: the shareholder. The dominant mantras were “free markets” and “driving shareholder value.” The conservative business perspective was taught in all large MBA schools. We learned that “What is good for business is good for America.” Indeed, progressive views on corporate responsibility that recognized all stakeholders rarely saw the light of day.
In terms of marketing, companies were product-centric. Their focus was: How do we get more people to buy our product?
During the conservative business era, no one said it was “political” to hire lobbyists to advocate for conservative legislation favoring the company and its shareholders. Donations for politicians who supported lower corporate taxes were normative. Going further, large corporations often supported candidates in both parties. This was even better for business … if you could afford it.
Sea Changes
But product markets changed radically starting in the 1990s. Corporations lost their monopoly on product information, thanks to the internet. By the 2000s, buyers could complete most of the buying process before contacting a company or a sales representative.
Just as important, labor market power shifted radically. For most of the 20th century, it was hard for job seekers to learn about a company’s true labor practices. Now, sites such as Glassdoor provide forums where current and former employees can anonymously review companies. Job seekers use the internet to choose which companies to pursue or avoid. So, even while union power has faded, workers increasingly vote with their feet by avoiding or quitting poor employers.
Diversity
Corporate support for diversity was the first major shift toward progressive business practices. The 1964 Civil Rights Act had a widespread impact, including the formation of the EEOC and its power to enforce laws against workplace discrimination.
While many companies resisted it initially, many others created competitive advantages by embracing diversity programs. Diversity laggards suffered the consequences. Customers and job seekers tended to avoid corporations that did not support diversity.
One of the early adopters of diversity is Unilever. Their Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, which started in 2004, is the stuff of legends. The campaign delivered a 60% jump in revenue over 10 years.
Today, corporate diversity programs are normative. Companies are not labeled “activist” when they feature people of color in ads or require diversity training for all employees. That said, there is still a long way to go, especially in industries like hi-tech.
Pay Equity
One especially stubborn aspect of corporate responsibility involves pay equity. White workers are about 50 percent more likely than workers of color to hold good jobs, and much less likely to be displaced from their jobs by automation. Women receive 81 cents for every dollar earned by men.
These statistics highlight the systemic nature of racism and sexism in the US.
A leader in correcting pay iniquity is Salesforce. They have spent over $12 million on pay raises to reduce it.
The Salesforce example is not yet normative. Many corporate boards conveniently dismiss pay inequity as inappropriate corporate activism. They say it is not their fault if the labor market pays less to minorities and women.
Others, like Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, regard their pay equity investment as good business strategy. It is closely tied to maintaining their top competitive position around the world.
Sustainability
Corporations now pay close attention to the environmental catastrophe due to global warming. GM recently announced it will only offer electric vehicles (EVs) by 2035. Most US utilities offer customers incentives to adopt energy efficient products (e.g., LED lighting, solar generation) and technologies (smart thermostats). The examples are numerous and growing daily.
Companies that offer sustainability products and services or favor suppliers who actively support sustainability are now normative. They are not activist corporations.
What Are Conservatives Afraid Of?
The number two Google search result for the term progressive corporations is a self-proclaimed “consumer watchdog” website. It declares at the top of its home page:
The Cardinal rule of business is to never even discuss politics, yet some companies have recklessly chosen to alienate half of the country by attacking Donald Trump and/or Republicans, pushing for censorship of conservative speech, and/or supporting the false and racist narrative of systemic racism in police and in America in general. These companies are a threat to our freedoms. If we do nothing, then their left-wing ideologies become the norm.
On the one hand, it is shocking this fake consumer watchdog site ranks so high on Google. On the other, it is a sign of the tumultuous times we live in.
The Way Forward
Many large corporations now enhance their competitiveness by embracing progressive thinking. For marketers, brand activism is nothing more than aligning marketing efforts with the company’s use of progressive thinking to improve its competitive position.
Companies that think business success depends on a singular focus on the shareholder are getting left behind.
Want to learn more about how to leverage progressive thinking into your marketing programs? Contact us.
Read More: Brand activism