Digital Marketing
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING (and Why Does Your Business Need It)?
by Shea Bennett, Head of Digital Marketing at Identity
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ontent marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on the creation and distribution of relevant, consistent and valuable content to target, attract and retain a clearly-defined audience, looking to drive profitable customer activity. To look at it another way, traditional marketing sells a product, while content marketing sells the idea of a product. It plants a seed in the mind of the consumer, so when they come to make a decision about a purchase, are thinking about changing suppliers or are looking for a business solution to a specific problem As they like to say: content is king. But the reality is good content is king. A lacklustre approach to content marketing can actually damage your brand. In this article, I will look at six of the most important content marketing tools for brands.
Blogs Blogging is the number one most used content marketing tactic by both business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) marketers. Blogs have tremendous value in building authority, particularly with search engines. Google loves blogs, and a well-structured, regularly-updated blog on your website will quickly become a highly-prized source of traffic from search
queries, boosting your SEO (and ranking) accordingly. Blogs also build authority with your website visitors, too. By showing that you are an expert in your field and knowledgeable enough to be publishing content on a consistent basis you will quickly start to be seen as a thought leader.
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Content is king. But the reality is good content is king.
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Blogs are owned media – the content is yours, and yours alone. But through social sharing, comments and guest posts, blogs can become an important component of your broader social marketing strategy, enabling you to build a loyal, online community. For best results, use a consistent brand voice in your blog articles and try to be personable (and never personal). Don’t use the platform as a sales tool – talk about brand vision, industry trends, offer analysis and predictions, publish “how to” guides and deliver value to readers. Blogs are a commitment – at Identity we recommend a minimum of one blog post per week to maximise return on investment – but it absolutely pays off. Indeed, the “long tail”
value of blogging is such that over time the collective weight of all of your blog content will establish itself as the primary source of interest in your business website.
Images Visual content is a key component in both B2B and B2C marketing, and 70% of marketers planned to increase their use of original visual assets in the past year. When you look at the statistics it’s easy to understand why. Blog posts with images receive 94% more views than those without. On Twitter, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favourites and 150% more retweets. And a whopping 87% of all interactions on Facebook include a photo. For brands, it’s essential that bespoke, tailored imagery plays a key role in all content marketing. Don’t rely on product shots and stock photography, and be sure to master the specifications of each platform.
Video Two to three years from now you probably won’t be reading this article – you’ll be watching it. Like mobile, video is enjoying a massive uptrend that is showing no signs of slowing down. Indeed, it’s accelerating: by 2017 video is expected to account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic, and a recent Nielsen study indicated that 64% of marketers expect video to dominate their strategies in the near future. YouTube receives more than one billion unique visitors every month, and last year the amount of video from people and brands in Facebook’s News feed increased by a factor of 3.6 year-over-year. Snapchat has used video in its Stories tool to rapidly grow its global audience to over 150 million daily users who consume (wait for it) 10 billion video clips each and every day. One in three Britons now watch at least one online video a week – that’s 20 million people in the UK alone.
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