October 24, 2011 in Articles, Lead Acquisation, Website Conversion, Website Traffic Strategies by Conversion Leadership

Content Marketing – Emerging Marketing Tactic For The 21st Century

The principle is simple…Write great content and give it away! But Content Marketing is more than that and it has become one of the techniques of choice use by successful online businesses.

Content Marketing means creating, publishing and promoting informational content. These can be blog posts, articles, white papers and instructional videos and then promoting that content in order to make it readily available to your target market – on demand.

Content Marketing Defined

More specifically, Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

In other words, a great content marketing strategy would seek first to understand exactly what your primary target market is actively looking for, create content to answer that expressed need in the market place, and then promote that content so it can be found easily.

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you’re delivering high-value information that makes your buyer more intelligent. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Traditional Marketing Is Failing

Consumers have simply shut off the traditional world of marketing. They skip television advertising, simply ignore magazine advertising, and now have become so adept at online “surfing” that they can take in online information without a care for banners or buttons. (This phenomenon is known as banner blindness and makes traditional online advertising largely irrelevant).

Smart marketers understand that traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute, and that there has to be a better way. Thought leaders and marketing experts from around the world, including the likes of Seth Godin and hundreds of the leading thinkers in marketing have concluded that content marketing isn’t just the future, it’s the present.

Marketing Is Impossible Without Great Content

Social Networks are wonderful for engagement but, research is rapidly achieving consensus the largest social network of them all, Facebook, falls somewhat short. In an article written earlier in this year, Chris Coch outlines 4 Reasons Why Facebook Stinks for B2B Marketing.

Twitter on the other hand, is proving to be an exceptional service for B2B marketers because of it’s rapid flow of information, fast and very effective search capabilities and that the whole platform supports the use external links for more information as the basis for leveraging customer engagement. To read how a leading marketing company is using Twitter in their B2B marketing efforts, visit Marketo’s website for the key results.

Information Marketing Is Not Content Marketing

Re-read the definition one more time. This time though, remove the words “relevant” and “valuable”.

That’s the difference between content marketing and information marketing you often get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.”

Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). Good content marketing makes a person stop…read…think…behave differently.

According to the Roper Public Affairs:

• 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company information in a series of articles versus an advertisement.
• 70% say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company.
• 60% say that company content helps them make better product decisions.

Think of this – what if your customer looked forward to receiving your marketing? What if, when they received it, via print, email, website, they spent 15, 30, 45 minutes with it?

Interested in developing a Content Marketing Strategy for your business? Ask us about our Content Marketing Strategy for developing great content.

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