Why your business should be using content marketing

There’s a lot of buzz around content marketing at the moment. Should your business be getting involved?

What is it, what does it involve, and what benefits will you enjoy?

Old trick, new clothes?

Like many new buzzwords, content marketing is a new term for something that’s been around for a while. But it’s been given a new focus as digital communication has become natural for consumers, mainly through social media.

Many companies, particularly eCommerce enterprises, that are active in social media quickly realise they need a constant supply of original and relevant content to fully engage prospects and customers. An engaged audience is more likely to purchase.

What’s the technical overhead?

Content is often written but can also be images, video and audio files. Written content such as case studies, articles, tutorials and blogs can be hosted on your own company website.

You need to be able to add and delete content easily; the ability to schedule publishing and deleting of copy is also useful.

Content should have sharing buttons for readers to propagate it to their followers (and because Google likes shareable content) and a ‘comment’ facility for prospects to engage directly with you.

Video and audio hosting

Audio podcasts or videos can be hosted on another platform like YouTube or SoundCloud. Otherwise, if they get very popular, your website performance could suffer, which in turn could affect your eCommerce figures.

What’s next?

Once content is in place you can send messages out on the relevant social media platforms to alert followers, gain their interest and hopefully have conversations with them.

At the very least, regularly adding content to your website tells Google that your site is current and active, which boosts SEO. But a well executed content marketing strategy will deliver so much more.

Big benefits

As well as contributing to brand awareness, good content helps to build relationships based on trust.

Trust leads to sales, so you should see a significant increase in sales, for costs that are a fraction of traditional one-way advertising techniques.

If you would like to discuss your content marketing with us, please get in touch as we’d love to help.