I bet you’ve come across cliques like ‘content is king’ in your recent online escapades. Or better yet, maybe you’ve heard ‘quality over quantity ‘ or ‘content strategy’ among many other content marketing buzzwords.
The truth is, while most people have an idea of what content marketing is, many find it hard to determine if content marketing is worth it. Before we get to whether content marketing adds any value to your business, let’s define it first.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the creation, sharing, and promotion of different media to attract, engage and retain clients. Compared to other forms of marketing, content marketing is an indirect promotion of a brand and its products.
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The main objective of content marketing is to stimulate interest in potential customers to learn more about your company. The media, aka the content used in content marketing, can include blog posts, video content, podcasts, email newsletters, and social media posts. If content marketing is the road to paradise, content is the signposts that give directions to la-la land.
That said, distributing valuable content is only aimed at a clearly defined audience. This can only happen after thorough research and the creation of buyer personas. Furthermore, content marketing only provides a positive ROI or online sales after consistent and strategic campaigns aimed at the target audience.
Is content marketing the same as inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing and content marketing are basically the same but often thought of differently, courtesy of industry jargon. Both have the goal of creating value for business prospects, attracting them, and finally, retaining clients. Content marketing, or should I say inbound marketing, does all the above subtly while providing solutions to potential clients. Inbound/content marketing will both involve a blog, video, podcast, infographic, SEO, and definitely lots of words. While most say that the two are different, they mean the same thing and have one common goal: Help the customer see the value of your business and how it solves their problems. This begs the question, are content marketing efforts worth it, or just hype and time waster?
Content marketing is effective
Yes, this is a bold statement, but there’s a ton of data from Demand Metric to support it.
Less expensive, more qualified leads
As per Demand Metric’s infographic, content marketing costs 62% less than any other marketing strategy. This can be attributed to the long-term returns of content marketing. For instance, creating an evergreen post that solves a reader’s need and ranks well on search engines will see you getting leads months after the publish date. Just because content marketing is cheaper doesn’t mean the results are awful. On average, content marketing gives you 3x as many leads compared to traditional marketing.
Go ye to where your customers are at
If that’s not enough for convincing, here’s another stat: 20% of internet users’ time is spent online reading content. Additionally, 57% of people read content marketing titles at least once a month. As the game of brand awareness shifts online, more than the traditional media, content marketing proves valuable. Not only do you get to show off your brand subtly, but you also get to help consumers with their questions, which increases brand recall. You wouldn’t easily forget someone that helped you in the past, would you?
Ads are not a customer favorite
While ads are effective to some extent, consumers don’t want nor tolerate them. By 2015, 200 million people were using ad blockers, and the number is expected to rise as privacy breaks the ceiling and rattles ad-dependent content marketers. Furthermore, 86% of people will skip adverts, and 70% will choose articles, any day, over paid advertising
Content Marketing is building relationships
On the flip side, 60% of people, after reading brand content, are inspired to seek out a product from the business. What’s more, 80% of people appreciate learning about a brand from custom content.
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These stats show that online content marketing, when done right, can hand you the consumer’s heart, loyalty, and brand advocacy. Interesting content takes the spot on why people choose to follow your business on social media, which leads us to the next point.
It’s not just about creating content and closing that chapter. It’s a game of consistency, and no matter how cliche it may sound, Quality over Quantity.
As Orbit Media reports, consistency in content marketing leads to better returns. The report shows that bloggers who intentionally pump time and effort into blogging do make money. Orbit Media is not alone in making this claim. HubSpot complements this truth with its own. The CRM company notes that blogs with 16 posts a month can expect to triple their website traffic.
As Brian Dean puts it, the more time spent creating content, the better the results. Consumer’s bar for quality is only going higher. The ultimate truth still remains — it takes time to create content that is useful and share-worthy.
To achieve this type of useful and share-worthy content, you need a content strategy. The beauty of a content strategy is how it leads to organic lead generation subsequent to compounding traffic.
Let’s see content marketing at work with the content marketing examples below.
Case study: Realtor’s content generates leads
John Garuti III is a Southwest Florida realtor who invested heavily in advertising to develop leads. He found Google Ads leads were weak and decided to pivot a content-driven strategy focusing on video and written content.
He developed a “lead magnet” or buyer’s guide for Babcock Ranch, the community he specializes in. He has earned 270 leads from this content thus far, including 6 in the last month.
We started working with John recently to generate content. We created a content marketing strategy and focused on the keywords that he was well-positioned to rank for quickly.
For example, we did a post focusing on the keyphrase “homes for sale babcock ranch” a few weeks ago.
The result?
John is already in the first few pages of Google for this keyword and moving up quickly, as you can see.
Creative Content leads to even greater results
Remember the stats I shared above? One of them stated that 80% of people appreciate learning about a brand through custom content. For content to be custom and attractive to prospects, it needs to be creative content.
Take our client, Cloud Compliance Solutions, for instance. We got them started on HubSpot and kicked off several email campaigns that framed their services as a NASCAR pit crew.
IT professionals responded to the creative framing positively, and we achieved an email CTR of 5.2% (the average CTR of email campaigns is 2.6%).
Conclusion
Again, we have to admit that a content marketing campaign can be a whirlwind when you have other business operations to think about. However, the value content marketing brings to the table is undeniable. If you want to get the positive ROI content marketing is sure to give, schedule a free consultation with our content marketing team. We will develop a content marketing strategy, custom-tailored to your business needs.
