Content marketing refers to marketing that creates and shares free content in order to attract and retain a very specific and well-defined customer demographic. This content is provided in hopes that ultimately recipients will use the information to make purchases from the vendor or brand.
How Will Content Attract an Audience?
When you create free content and put it online, provided the content is any good, it will attract an interested audience. If you keep creating content, not only will you retain that audience, your viewership will continue to grow. Your content will get read, shared, and spread all across the internet, boosting your page ranking and raising market awareness to your brand in a way that traditional advertising only wishes it could compete with. Turning this traffic into sales takes only one more step by providing your established readership with calls to action.
What Types Of Content Marketing Can I Use?
Content marketing can include virtually any type of content including videos, photos, podcasts, multimedia articles and so on. If you head to YouTube, you’ll find hundreds or thousands of businesses that are making use of content marketing by providing interesting and entertaining content. Some of the more remarkable success stories are videos like “DollarShaveClub.com,” a viral video that has received nearly 8 million views for a business that sells a razorblade subscription service. One reason that the company’s video has been so successful is that it describes the offered services in about 90 seconds, but does so in a way that’s engaging, humorous and ultimately worth sharing to your friends.
Should I Be Using Videos?
Of course, videos aren’t for everyone or every business. Depending on the type of information your business needs to deploy and your target demographics, you may be better off making use of articles or infographics. One first-rate example of content marketing can be found at toptenreviews.com, a website that provides a variety of technology reviews and then compares and contrasts the reviewed products. By making use of informational graphs and a wide variety of source material, sites like this are able to earn the trust of their readership, and the next time they have a technological purchase to make, you can trust that they’ll know exactly where to get the information required to make their next big buy.
Keeping Consumers Engaged
As a final note, it’s worth mentioning that content marketing is also one of the most powerful means of promoting your website. Everyone wants a top spot on Google, and Google wants to give those coveted positions to websites that consumers love. And one way Google can measure if a consumer loves your site or not is how long they spend there. Content marketing provides an excellent way to draw traffic that will spend more than a minute or two on your site and return on a regular basis, which can ultimately boost your page ranking. With all the synergy that content marketing offers your business online, in this day and age who can afford to ignore it?
Photo credit: forbes.com
