Your Business Dies Every Minute You Ignore Content Marketing. How?
The internet is a crowded space. Competitors are everywhere. The market is densely occupied by myriad brilliant products.
How can you sell your way to success?
How can you win your customer’s faith when you have to cut through tough competition?
Is that question bugging you too?
Don’t fret. You are not alone!
You need an edge to stand out and a unique voice to give a persona to your business.
Whether or not your product or service is connected to the digital landscape, your customers are constantly surfing the web to find your services or products. And content is what they look for.
The solution to winning your audience’s trust is to serve them with content they are looking for and provide valuable information. That is “Content Marketing.”
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing means not to ask prospects for something, but rather give them. It’s more than advertising, focused on converting visitors into customers, and customers into repeat buyers – all with the power of creating and sharing valuable content.
That’s the reason 42% of B2B marketers are satisfied with content marketing. (Source: CMI).
And, 53% of marketers believe blog content to be their topmost inbound marketing priority. (Source: HubSpot, 2017).
Organizations are now employing more content marketing professionals than ever before.
How is Content Marketing Helping Brands?
Content marketing strategy includes creating, publishing, sharing and promoting several pieces of content, including blogs, articles, podcasts, infographics, videos, case studies and other media. The type of content crafted is closely related to what you sell or your business is based on. The aim is to target consumers by providing them with the information they seek.
Here is what it does to your brand:
Content marketing makes you a top-of-mind resource
Assuring your audience that you are available when they need is a pleasant gesture. And, it would be even better if you prove your expertise consistently. Content marketing gives you that opportunity to build your audiences’ trust. It allows you to create a how-to guide if you want to guide prospects through a potential solution. Or create an infographic if you would like to share some insightful industry statistics. It, thus, makes you a top-of-mind resource when it’s time to make a purchasing decision.
If you are a bicycle seller and you are helping your audience choose a bicycle for their age, you are helping your audience with valuable information while building trust and top-of-mind recall.
Content marketing builds not just followers but advocates
This is the beauty of genuinely helping your audience. If you are constantly giving valuable and interesting content to your audience, you not just making followers, rather you are attracting advocates who trust you. This audience that enjoys reading your content is highly likely to share your content if your content is worth it.
If you are an online drug seller and you offer useful information simplifying the meaning and usage of every drug, your audience will find your content worthy of sharing, and they will most likely recommend you to their friends. You can’t do that with direct advertising.
Content marketing gives you user insights
When you create useful content, your audience interacts with you at a more direct level because you seem approachable. Be it through social channels or blog comments, your audience is constantly in touch, and that helps you gain insights about what they are looking for. That further helps you polish your product or service and deliver exactly what you are expected to deliver.
Content marketing creates monopoly
The more relevant and useful you are to your audience, the less is the competition. Content marketing allows you to establish thought leadership and monopoly in the market by proving that you have more value to give than your competitors. Outsmarting competitors with a bigger celebrity in your ad is cliché and does not work anymore. Staying relevant and useful does!
What if Content Marketing is Ignored?
Glad you asked.
Your business will die every minute and every second.
You will ignore millions of customers
Content Marketing incorporates all popular online platforms to reach your audience. Be it social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or photo-sharing app like Instagram, or blogging service Tumblr, or YouTube and much more. Read here how to align your social media to content marketing strategy.
Before discussing the drawback of ignoring content marketing, have a look at this data.
Facebook alone has 1.97 billion monthly active users. YouTube has 1 billion users. The photo-sharing app Instagram has more than 600 million monthly active accounts and the blogging service Tumblr has more than 550 million active blog users on their site as of April 2017. (Source: Statista)
Today, 68% of customers reach a business using social media before making a purchase decision.
The point is if you ignore content marketing, you miss millions of potential customers.
Your competition will soar ahead
Your competitors are already either planning or have launched a content marketing strategy. In this growing crowd where brands are struggling to get attention, content is the only way that remains to grab the attention of your potential customers. If you don’t, someone else will grab their attention.
61% of consumers are influenced by custom content.
If you don’t influence them, your competitors will.
You will miss out on a chance to save on your marketing costs
You realize that traditional marketing costs way more, don’t you?
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.
If you keep spending that amount of money on traditional marketing, your customer acquisition process will definitely not be efficient; and there will be a time when your competitors will get more customers with less marketing spend while you will be busy calculating costs. Oh, did I mention lower conversion rates?
Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters.
Conclusion
Kicking off any new business marketing plan can be difficult, but often, just beginning is the challenging part. This is essentially true for content marketing if you do it right. Build a sustainable content marketing strategy and stick to it before your competitors outsmart you. Your business is destined to outlive others because content marketing has just happened to you.
Abhyudaya Tripathi
Latest posts by Abhyudaya Tripathi (see all)
- Your Business Dies Every Minute You Ignore Content Marketing. How? - November 13, 2017
You’re right. If you ignore content marketing, you’ll miss everything and competitors will outsmart you. That should be the aim, we should focus on converting visitors into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. I’ve learned so much from this article. Thanks for sharing your ideas with us!
Thanks for sharing such an informative blog on this topic. It has really helped me in getting through this topic