Content marketing is the promotion of a product, service, brand using content and building long-term communication with the audience. Sometimes content marketing is called “advertising without ads” because it does not impose anything, but only informs and creates conditions under which a person will want to buy. It doesn’t matter what exactly – the tool is necessary when promoting almost any product, service and brand, and you can read about some exceptions at the end of the article.
The specificity of content marketing is that it works gradually and organically, first catching users and arousing interest, then turning the target audience into the audience of a particular brand, and only then into buyers, ideally permanent ones.
Problems that content marketing solves
Content marketing is one of the main assistants in promoting a website in search results. The more quality content that meets the needs of the audience, the more visitors will visit the site. And here are other tasks that content marketing solves.
- Increase brand awareness. A person sees the content of the brand, the name is deposited in his memory. After that, when he hears or sees the name, he remembers – oh, but I have already heard / seen / read about this brand, I know it. This is recognition, the first step to loyalty.
- Build a positive brand image. The more useful, interesting, funny, memorable content from the brand the user sees, the higher the degree of his trust. If a person trusts the Goaltar company, when he needs to repair automatic gates, there is a high probability that he will turn to the Goaltar company.
- Show brand expertise. Competent work with content marketing includes educational and image materials in which brand specialists show how much they know about their product and how much valuable information they are ready to give to customers.
- Expand your audience and increase your subscriber base. Blog articles that appeared in the top organic results, posts on social networks with a call to subscribe to the community.
- Provide feedback channels. These can be reviews in social networks or on the website, comments on articles and posts – by analyzing them, you can find growth points, improve the service, refine the product, make a stronger unique selling proposition (USP).
- Improve the position of the site in the search results. If you post publications on external sites and provide a link to the company’s website, you form its external link profile. And this is one of the most important ranking factors for sites in organic search results.
- Increase sales volumes. The ultimate goal of content marketing in SMM and not only is sales. Interesting, up-to-date, high-quality materials plus brand trust is a good option to ensure sales growth.
Content marketing is a very effective tool for website promotion. It allows you to attract the target audience, increase traffic and improve positions in search engines.
Pros and cons of content marketing
We talked about the advantages earlier: these are traffic, new customers, sales, recognition, and most importantly, user trust and loyalty. But there are also disadvantages.
It’s long. Tune in to it right away. It’s like SEO promotion: you need to work hard on the site so that both search engines and users like it. The content is the same: a few articles are not enough for a person to believe you, at least several months must pass for the articles to start regularly reaching the top, and for regular subscribers to gather in social networks. Many people make this mistake of abandoning content marketing after not seeing immediate results. We will talk about this and other errors at the end of the article.
It is expensive. If you tune in to full-fledged work and the creation of a remote edition in order to close all tasks, the amounts will be tangible. How much exactly depends on the niche, competencies and experience of specialists, volumes and tasks.
Information dissemination channels
The main weapon and tool of content marketing is information and only information. But – an important addition – high-quality information. The first and main task that needs to be solved is to fill the site with high-quality content, but, mind you, it’s not easy to fill it and forget it once, you need to write constantly for the site. Once you have embarked on the path of content marketing, then it will no longer be possible to turn off it. The second step is to choose the right platforms for posting information and think carefully about the channels for its distribution.
We prioritize the following distribution channels for your content strategy:
- search engines, natural search results;
- contextual advertising systems;
- email marketing (maintenance of corporate mailings on your subject);
- social networks (maintaining your own groups and official pages and using other groups as channels for disseminating your information);
- specialized online publications on your subject (and with content marketing, these will be articles, not “media”);
- blogosphere (maintaining your own corporate blog and attracting top runet bloggers to disseminate your information).
Post articles on thematic blogs, create a content newsletter for users, go to social networks if you are strong enough and set yourself the task of increasing your brand awareness and strengthening audience loyalty to your company. But first of all, think about promoting your site in terms of traffic (and therefore, in terms of a wide semantic core). There is no point in using other channels of influence until you have solved the problem of attracting natural search traffic. This is where content marketing comes in handy. Distributing quality, interesting content online is the only way to increase the number of natural links to your site.
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