How Content Marketing Can Help Your Business Growth

Content marketing is the present and perhaps the future of marketing for businesses. It is the proven modern day working marketing strategy. It can help any business achieve its overall objectives. Are you wondering why? Or you are not sure about this? Let’s put this in perspective so you can understand better.

 
Why Content Marketing?

Wait a minute, when last did you act on an advert after watching a TV advert. When last did you decide to give a darn about that squeezed advert while reading a print magazine? The truth is, you can’t remember. This is because they simply have the short-term attention span on the target and cater less for your value.

 
These traditional marketing strategies don’t work well anymore with the customers. They are becoming less effective and costly for businesses. Targeted customers feel like they are being poached by hungry marketers who are only after their wallet. The customers now have DVR to swiftly skip your interrupting adverts while focusing on their favourite TV programs. They have AdBlockers installed on their gadgets to let them ignore your boring paid adverts while they are mining for relevant information online.

 
This is information age; your customers are getting wiser, more informed. They are mindful of who to trust with their wallet. They want the best value for themselves. They don’t care about your goals and objective and all your shitty campaigns. They purely want values because they believe they deserve it.

What is Content Marketing and Can it Help Your Business?

Content marketing is the process of creating and providing quality, relevant and in-depth informative contents for specific and targeted customers. This is for the purpose of educating and changing the customer’s behaviour — either to build trust or persuade him/her to purchase your product or services. It is an ongoing process, in order to attract and win new prospects for your business while your existing customers are retained and delighted.

 
Content Marketing is a strategic balance between what you want and what your customer need, but carefully designed to portray yourself as their hero. The best and powerful content marketing strategy can turn your visitors into evangelists. Your evangelists worth 10 times the thousands or millions spent on paid advertisements. The customers read your contents and in due course, started believing in your opinions because of the value he gained. They then decide to trust you with their wallet, which can in turn become a lasting and returning customer for your business with little effort.

 
Few Stats from Content Management Institutes to chill your nerves.

· Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing methods.
· Companies that blog have 55% more website visitors than those that don’t.
· 68% of marketers agree e-newsletters are the top email messages that help to achieve their business goals.
· 61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content
· 90% of consumers find custom content useful and 78% believe that organisations providing custom content are interested in building good relationships with them.

 
Examples of companies that do content marketing

A lot of notable small to medium and large businesses/companies have embraced and utilized the power of content marketing. The best examples of companies that do content marketing include; Apple, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, AT&T, IBM, General Electric, LinkedIn etc.

 
So, how you can establish your business as an authority who provide relevant and valuable contents like the giants? Well, in content marketing, there are a lot of media or format you can effectively use to disseminate your valuable information. Such as;

· Articles and blog posts
· Case Studies
· E-books
· Podcasts
· Whitepapers
· Videos
· Presentations
· Webcasts
· Social Media
· Infographics
· Email and Newsletters etc.

 
So, How Can Content Marketing Help your Business Growth?

Content is king in driving prospects while marketing can be referred to as the queen in winning prospects. The combination of these powerful tools can immensely help your business achieve its goals if it is well optimised in line with the best content marketing strategies.

 
A well-optimized content marketing plan can help your business growth in the following ways;

· Building a concrete and lasting trust in your customers — both new and existing customers
· Supplement your overall business and marketing goals
· Increase revenue, sales margin, and positive customer ratings
· Position your business as an authority and expert in your industry
· Increase the leads through blog subscriptions and email opt-ins
· Ultimately dominate search engines favourite spots and/or improve SERP ranking because Google and other top search engines appreciate value-driven contents for their users
·It is about giving values, hence you are more attracted to people and business that appreciate values.
· And many other innumerable opportunities for your business.

 
Conclusion

The bottom line is, content marketing is an ongoing, customer centric and value-driven marketing process. It is a strategy for your company to gain from the huge market depends on your dedication and visions. To be successful with content marketing, you need dedication and strategic plans on how to create engaging contents that can capture your targeted customers’ attention. It is not a hit-and-run model of marketing; it is an ongoing process of creating and curating the most relevant and valuable contents for your business and its targeted ideal customers.

 
This is written as a guest post by Abdullahi Salaudeen. He is a professional freelance writer and a content marketer. A result-oriented, passionate and dedicated fellow who advocates simplicity, values and creativity. He helps businesses and individuals accomplish their goals using working strategies and creative words.