What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the latest buzzword in Internet marketing, but in reality, it’s not a new concept.  Businesses have always used content in many different forms to attract customers to their brand. Successful content marketing resonates with your target market, and draws them in. Begin by creating an interesting and engaging story and let the content do the work for you.

At Brandtastic, we have been using content marketing in our campaigns for years. Content marketing creates real results – and we have proof!  Many of our clients have seen tremendous success by adding social media, blogs, press releases, and email to their marketing plan. It takes time to build up quality content, but after the initial work is done, the content works on its own to bring in business.

This is Northeastern Chimney’s blog that gets national attention and brings in visitors from all over the country.

We began using a content marketing strategy for one of our clients, Northeastern Chimney Services, about a year ago. Since then, the company has experienced tremendous growth from these marketing efforts. Their website visits are up 458% just from adding a blog and social media to supplement their website. The site is now ranking well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) across the country for their top keywords and as a result, business is booming! All this success comes from sharing carefully crafted information with our client’s target market.

Check out many more content marketing success stories from our clients on our website!

Content marketing is only popular because it’s free, right?

It’s true that using content as an inbound marketing strategy can greatly reduce a company’s advertising spending, but content marketing is not necessarily free. It takes time to develop good content that is of value to your consumers.

Many companies, such as Coca-Cola and Amazon, are spending close to 25 percent of their marketing budget on content marketing.  This is a huge amount of money considering their total advertising budget! It can be less expensive to switch to attraction marketing methods rather than paid advertising, but it does come at a cost. It takes time and money to produce and distribute quality content to a targeted audience.

Coca-Cola has a very effective content marketing strategy on Facebook – just check out their 58 million likes and over 900,000 people talking about them!

Also, with “content marketing” as the latest hot-topic in Internet Marketing, everyone wants to get into it. For this reason, the amount of information available to consumers is growing exponentially. And search engines are working hard to find ways to rank only the most relevant and best quality information at the top, which greatly raises the standards for valuable content on the Internet.

It no longer works to mass-produce content that contains typos, duplication, or is of poor quality in general. To use content marketing effectively, you must produce quality content that serves a purpose to your consumers and is interesting and engaging to interact with.

So, how do I get started?

When consumers are researching online before making a purchasing decision, they are looking for valuable information – not advertisements. People search for quality content and when they find it, they are more likely to return to your company once they are prepared to make a purchase.

A simple way to get started is by starting a company blog. This way you can anticipate the questions your customers may have about the your business and provide this information for them in the form of a blog post. You can also set up a profile on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest to share more information.

Create content that’s worthy of sharing and make it simple to pass along.

These days, content is easily shared between people via various social networks, bookmarking sites, and email. This social sharing is the new way word of mouth recommendations spread.  Creating shareable and engaging content is very valuable to any business because it can easily be passed on from person to person thus spreading the word of your business further and further.

Even those who will never purchase your product or service may share your content on social media or email it to a friend, thus giving your company more exposure to a wider audience. There are endless ways that content marketing can benefit your business.

Content marketing is very valuable if it is done correctly. You know that you are an expert in your field, but do your customers know? Share your expertise and increase the awareness of your brand at the same time. And if you’re too busy running your business, Brandtastic can do your content marketing for you! Just give us a call and we’ll create a custom content marketing plan for your business.