One of the most important tasks of content marketing is to pick up the customer’s current interests, problems and challenges. Helpful tips and useful information convey trust, credibility and competence. Storytelling is also a popular method in content marketing. Case studies of customer projects, examples and stories make the content livelier and more authentic.
Content marketing is the most powerful tool for increasing awareness and generating customer contacts. Businesses use content marketing to acquire new customers and drive sales using website analytics, keyword research, and targeted strategy recommendations.
Content marketing is all about well-performing content. These are not just a few nice sentences on a website, but the key to a convincing sales success. The competition is fierce, and purchasing decisions are often based on research and trust.
As a rule, customers today use the possibilities of the Internet to find out about products and services that interest them. They find out about the latest trends and exchange ideas on various platforms. Content marketing can be used to address potential customers by conveying content about products and services or industry topics interestingly.
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Very Simple: Instead of Offering Your Product, Offer a Solution!
The conveying of context and valuable information is essential for content marketing. It’s about the benefit or the value perceived by the customer. If your content is valuable, it will be read, shared and resonated with your customers. Also, timing and targeting are crucial to get your audience interested in your product or service.
Content Marketing Allows Brands To Differentiate Themselves Through Storytelling.
As part of the noticeably increasing relevance of content marketing, more and more marketers are discussing terms such as storytelling, transmedia storytelling or visual storytelling. Storytelling is about the narrative method by which explicit and tacit knowledge is taken in and passed on as a metaphor. By involving the audience, the knowledge to be conveyed becomes easier to understand and internalize. This way, a story can be retold much more easily.
Why Is Content Marketing So Important?
The importance of content marketing in digital marketing is demonstrated by its ability to increase the quality of traffic to your website. When it comes to attracting attention and generating high-quality leads that support healthy sales growth, content is the key to success.
Unique content sets you apart from your competitors. Your company establishes itself as the leading authority in the industry, and you show your customers that you know your stuff.
The most effective way to drive traffic to your website is through the content you develop for your blog, SEO, and social media marketing. While many important elements fall under these categories, it all boils down to the quality of your content.
The higher the quality of content, the more valuable it is to your audience and the more likely they are to engage with your business. The more they engage with your business and spend time on your website, the more likely they will develop trust in your brand and convert them into prospects and customers.
What Forms of Content Marketing Are There?
There are different forms of content marketing. Here are the most important ones:
Texts – In all areas of content marketing, the text plays an important role. For example, even if a video is the landing page’s focus, it is usually framed with text. Depending on the service or product, different text formats are suitable: blog posts, media releases, newsletters, case studies or even recipes. The types of text can also be differentiated: storytelling, portraits, checklists, listicles, news reports, customer feedback or field reports.
Videos – Videos are also playing an increasingly important role in content marketing. Why actually? Emotions can be shown with videos. A majority of customers prefer video messages to text. As with text, videos come in a variety of formats and content. This includes, for example, corporate videos, branding videos, product videos, commercials, animated videos, tutorials and webinars.
E-mails/newsletters – A regular newsletter can be used to maintain and strengthen customer loyalty. Newsletter marketing keeps customers informed about new products, services and promotions. Insights behind the scenes of a company increase acceptance and sympathy among customers. In addition, targeted queries offer the opportunity to make purchases that have not yet been made. When it comes to newsletters, less is more. Simply designed newsletters without attachments often work better than complex content that sometimes cannot even be opened in the inbox.
Pictures – A good picture says more than a thousand words. This also applies to content marketing. Images can loosen up texts or clarify more complex text passages. Infographics, animated images, image galleries or virtual tours can add additional value.
Content Marketing and SEO – What’s The Difference?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) refers to the technical processes (on-page optimization) and marketing measures (off-page optimization) to improve visibility within the organic search results and thus increase traffic on a website or blog.
Content marketing is a communication and business strategy to publicize and promote a company or brand based on providing valuable content in corporate communications. Content marketing focuses on creating genuinely interesting content that is useful and helpful to a target audience, such as B. Tips, how-tos, industry information, storytelling, and user-generated content.
A successful content marketing strategy is based on close observation and dialogue with the target group. Feedback from comments, social media discussions, and customer service serves as the basis for creating content that addresses current challenges and issues.
No SEO Without Content Marketing
Successful online business strategies combine content marketing and SEO. Today, SEO is all about content and social engagement. This is where a content marketing strategy comes in. However, marketing content must be created and advertised according to SEO aspects such as search relevance, keywords, linking and cross-media promotion (off-page SEO). Of course, you’ll have to rely on working agencies specialized for your industry. If you’re in the SaaS industry, then you’ll have to work with an SEO agency for SaaS because they have the necessary industry understanding, know what SEO strategies work best for SaaS companies, and have the content knowledge required for boosting your site’s performance.
SEO is no longer just a technical task for a webmaster. At the same time, a few basic technical things to consider in technical SEO make it easier for search engines to index a website, such as meta tags, keywords, responsiveness, page speed, etc. (on-page SEO). But none of this is good for SEO alone if you don’t also provide the right content that customers are looking for. Because only what is sought can also be found.
The Perfect Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy can be used, for example, to win new customers in a targeted manner, improve/change the company’s image or increase awareness of a brand, product or person.
Only when you know what content the respective target group needs and how often, what types of content are suitable and through which channels this target group can best be reached can content marketing achieve what many hope for.
The following questions are particularly important when strategically planning content:
- What do you want to achieve with your content?
- Who do you want to reach with your content?
- When and where do you want to publish your content?
- What are you willing to invest in your content?
- How do you check the achievement of the goals?
Conclusion
Content marketing is an online trend and SEO hype, but its concept has been established for decades and has proven its sales-promoting effect. It is not for nothing that a comprehensive content marketing strategy has become an integral part of today’s SEO concepts. The increasing customer orientation in recent years has left lasting marks on both the search engine algorithm and the SEO scene. And that’s just as well.
