Creating quality content not only enables you to engage customers, but also increase traffic to your website and improve your search rankings.
Figures published by the Content Marketing Institute in 2015 showed 86 per cent of business-to-business businesses and 77 per cent of business-to-consumer businesses used content marketing, and that over 70 per cent of them were creating more content than they had the year before.
According to car search engine iSeeCars.com’s Founder Phong Ly, consumers use the quality and authority of content to form an impression of a brand and ultimately to make purchasing decisions.
Promotion strategy
Companies should not shy away from over-investing in big content. If you are focusing on producing small pieces of content or relying solely on social media to distribute content, your promotional strategy is unlikely to be as effective as those of companies investing in video production and other engaging content.
Brands are now moving away from marketing engagement based solely on blogs, social media and email marketing. While blogs remain effective for brand marketing, the content a company shares needs to be diverse now; blogs can be enhanced with photo galleries and embedded videos of product launches and other events.
Businesses should take time to evaluate and understand their target audience so they can create content that is tailored to them.
Sharing content
Content marketers use social media to share their content, but to share content through this channel successfully it must be shared regularly, and with the aim of inspiring the audience to share it, which will create precious ‘word of mouth’ advertising.
Content from other channels can be repurposed through social media too, without running the risk of incurring a penalty from Google as you would for using the same content across multiple blogs.
Re-sharing popular content is an important part of content marketing, as it can increase traffic, enables it to be seen in multiple time zones and increase the chances of it reaching consumers who may have missed it previously.
Ly concludes by advising companies to create and optimise content for mobile phones. Making a few changes enables content to available to those who prefer to access the internet via their phone. Content must be quick to read consumers who are likely to be on the move in order for it to be suitable for viewing on a mobile device.
