People are now shifting to a digital platform especially when it comes to communicating. This has also made businesses resort to new forms of marketing methods.
Over time, we have seen content marketing taking over traditional marketing. To market their content and promote themselves, businesses nowadays prefer digital platforms.
The aim of a business is to reach the public and make sure that they end up seeing its published content.
Source: OptinMonster
Traditional Marketing vs. Content Marketing
Even though content marketing is the new hype these days with blogs and various content to post, traditional marketing has laid the foundation of marketing for businesses. However, marketers find many drawbacks in this form of marketing such as higher costs and low interaction with customers.
Source: Lyfe Marketing
As the image above shows, 50% of marketers believe that there is little to no interaction with customers and 25% of them believe that traditional marketing is very costly. Considering these statistics, it does not come as a surprise that businesses have shifted to a cheaper and more convenient method to market their content.
Content marketing has gained much popularity with people since approximately 2.71 billion in this world own a smartphone giving them access to all these digital platforms where businesses post their content.
Marketing for a business is like an investment that reaps benefits over some time. Looking at the digital evolution taking place in the world, businesses have evolved as well.
Customers prefer digital marketing content these days so why should businesses stick to the same old boring methods of promoting themselves?
Source: OptinMonster
The global population consists of approximately 4.7 billion people who are actively using the internet with more than 3 billion using social media actively. With such a high number of people involved in digital forms of communication, it is no surprise that businesses want to use such platforms to reach out to them.
Content marketing focuses more on reaching out to people and providing them the right information through the right platforms. With more visual and personal content, this marketing method tends to have a greater impact on people than regular advertising.
With traditional forms of marketing like television advertisements, newspaper advertisements, flyers, and radio announcements, there are little chances of a business to interact with customers properly.
With little time to spare these days, customers seek attention from businesses as well. Since traditional marketing denies them this opportunity, they search for it in content marketing.
Traditional marketing uses the support of salesmen that tend to fool customers most times to increase the number of sales. Content marketing does the opposite of this.
Content marketing costs up to 62% less than regular marketing while also giving more than 3 times the leads than it. So obviously businesses that want to grow and get more attention, have opted for this method rather than market themselves through mainstream techniques.
Search Engine Optimization for Marketing
Before making a purchase, customers now research a product and then make a decision regarding it. In a single day, Google goes through 63,000 searches per second.
Before looking at how a business can market itself effectively using search engine optimization, you should know what it really is.
SEO is basically used by pages and people to show up in search engines like Google so their websites get more attention than usual. There are SEO keywords that need to be incorporated in the content for the pages to show up in the search engines.
SEO marketing can be complex but once you get a hold of the concept and follow the requirements properly, you can sail your way through it.
Source: Finances Online
The image above shows how SEO has seen increased usage over time and is expected to see a further rise. Businesses are keen on spending more on this form of content marketing because of the benefits they can gain from it.
It has become a vital marketing tool today which businesses rely on to gain more attention from people who search for products similar to theirs.
Search Engine Optimization might sound like an easy task but it requires great effort from the business’s end. Here are certain elements that need focus before diving into the concept of search engine optimization:
- Keywords: These are the most important part of SEO marketing but not the only ones. Without using keywords, your content would be redundant no matter what. Keywords can be single words or phrases used in your content that allow your posts to show up in search engines when people type in those specific words.
Keywords can be short-tail, long-tail, or local for content. However, it does not mean that you add keywords randomly in your content.
Proper research is required to make sure that the keywords you are using are those that have high search rates. Local keywords are mainly used for local SEOs which we will take a look at later.
Source: Vizlly
The image above shows that people mostly have a preference for long-tail keywords while searching. This means that they seek content with greater detail and specifications and this is exactly what businesses should target when creating search engine optimization content.
- Your content: What you post is definitely crucial to your marketing content. Your content should not only be engaging for the audience but also be informative. The whole concept of SEO marketing is that the content is educational rather than just an advertisement.
Most importantly, the content you post should be consistent and updated. If you are posting on a weekly basis then it is better to not delay your posts since audiences look for consistency in posts.
Your content should be relevant to what the audience is searching for. If people are looking for a website on high-quality clothing and you are posting content relevant to the search regularly, then your website will pop up in the search engine at the top.
Source: Neil Patel
This image is showing how a business or person can develop SEO through an entire process where each step is crucial in making the SEO content a success.
- Local Search Engine Optimization: If you are looking to target audience around you then local SEO should be your focus. 57% of the searches made by people are through their phones or tablets and most of these are focused on local content.
If your shop is located in a small town or city, then you would need to rely on using local SEO to attract the attention of people. You would incorporate keywords that show your local content to customers searching for specific products.
Moreover, local search engine optimization also brings in the idea of using Google maps that will show your location in the search engine whenever people search using the specific keywords.
If you want your local SEO content to be a major success then you would prefer using Google Maps, Google My Business, and such tools that will only navigate your audience towards you and your website.
Source: Result Driven SEO
The source shows that 85% of people tend to search for local businesses online with 61% of people becoming online buyers with the help of local SEOs.
- Search Engine Marketing: Do not confuse SEM with SEO since these both are different tactics to attract the audience towards a business. The latter focuses on written content and blog posts while SEM is largely focused on online advertisements like Google Ads, display ads and social media advertisements.
While it may not be an integral part of SEO content, it has a different place on its own in marketing. It can be used to target the audience in a completely different and innovative way.
SEM has more of a visual role to play than a written one when compared to SEO but it is equally important for a business to expand itself and spread the word about its products.
How to Market Content Effectively
Coming up with content for a business is a fairly simple task that can be completed after proper research. However, the main part lies in the way a business tends to market its content.
Source: HubSpot Blog
The image shows the main challenges that businesses tend to face when it comes to marketing content for themselves. What businesses find most challenging is to come up with content that is engaging enough for the audience.
To make sure that your content is marketed properly and is both seen and heard by customers, you need to work a little hard.
Firstly, you can partner yourself with some influencers that can work for you to market your content and products for people. These days people are highly influenced by digital and social media.
So what a business can do is find experts who are influencers and have them reach out to the audience for a better turnover rate.
Secondly, using other marketing platforms to promote content is quite common. Digital marketing is all about experimenting and a business can really see its strengths and weaknesses using this strategy.
If you post your content or your website link on your social media page, people can follow it and open it without having to specifically search for it. Moreover, customers that follow your social media page will automatically get to see that you have posted new content and will pursue it.
There are more than 2.38 billion people on Facebook that are active users making it a large platform for businesses to share links of their content.
Apart from using social media, you can use your email to send out subscription offers or links to your posts so your clients can see it. Emails can be versatile for usage and allow businesses to add newsletters or visual aids to attract customers towards their content.
Make sure that your emails are effective and not spam by addressing users by their names and adding a more personal touch to your emails.
Content should be consistent and reliable to be a success since readers do not just look at pictures but are attracted to what the content really means. Most importantly, your content should be based on facts and not lies or myths since people tend to research before choosing a product.
Conclusion
Businesses need to be very smart when marketing their content since the digital world is a fast-paced world where there are high competition and a number of potential customers. If you want to gain customers then you need to market your content effectively using techniques such as search engines and social media where people continue to search for products.
Before making a purchase, people tend to research a product in detail and not just look at the promotions that a business has to offer. So businesses need to shift from a selling point of view to a more informative point of view. These days you cannot hide facts or defects from your customers as it was once possible to do so through traditional marketing.
Content marketing gives businesses a platform to grow in all directions and get to interact with clients rather than just allure them to buy products. Marketing has become more of a relationship builder between customers and businesses rather than just a promotion based method.