Marketing has come a long way in the past decade. Earlier, Marketing consisted of print and television advertisements which were underscored by catchy one-liners and self-promotion. Businesses would spend hours wondering about that one single sentence that could generate enquiries, make passers-by enter a shop or make the marketing flyer worth a read.
However, as Marketing has moved more and more into the digital space, just punch lines or blatant self-promotion isn’t enough to generate interest from the consumers. The Internet has opened up numerous channels of discovery giving consumers lots of choices. But at the same time, the consumer is also weighed down by too many choices.
So, what does a consumer do amidst several similar choices? Typically, the consumer runs a filtering process in his mind that will take him to the best service or product that he’s looking for. Here I am assuming that the basic filtering in terms of offering, budget, location etc is done and now the consumer needs to choose from 5 equally suitable companies.
Now, this is where the companies have an opportunity to stand out from each other, create a unique identity and win over the customer. And, this is what has taken Digital Marketing to a whole new level. Today, the consumer has the intelligence to see through glorious self-promotions, advertisements, catchy tag-lines. The consumer tries to find out the real substance in a company. And that substance is found in the company’s knowledge in its area of expertise or in the transparent information that it gives out about its offering. This knowledge or information can do wonders for a potential customer – It can comfort him, make him feel that his money will be in safe hands and assure him that results will be delivered without fail.
Importance of content marketing
“Knowledge is power” and companies need to bring out that knowledge if they are looking to stand apart from other similar businesses, be perceived as more knowledgeable and gain more customers.
The art of Knowledge Sharing or Content Marketing has been instrumental in improving and turning around the fortunes of a number of companies. Let us take a look at a few of them:
- InsideOut
InsideOut, a corporate training company, started using content marketing in 2012 in order to improve their overall marketing strategy. InsideOut’s marketing strategy earlier dealt with sales based communication.
Realizing that their strategy was not getting them anywhere, they attempted a different approach. InsideOut attempted to create content which could hold attention and generate leads and they approached their strategy by focusing on small and simple slides, videos and articles.
InsideOut also realized that their strategy would only succeed if their content was visually appealing and had its own identity. They worked to produce their content through in house channels and promoted their content through e-mails, social media, their web-page and additional public relations work.
They witnessed remarkable improvements across the board. A few months after implementing content marketing, InsideOut witnessed 20 percent increase in click through rates, 87 percent decrease in opt-out rates and a staggering 388 percent increase in the amount of leads generated.
- City Index
City Index, a financial services company, launched a ‘Trading Academy’ which gave eight prospective traders an opportunity to win almost £100,000. The Academy was run as an elimination game show with a trader being eliminated every week and the two finalists were made to compete with each other in front of a live audience at City Hall.
The entire exercise was actually part of a content marketing exercise which was aimed at creating awareness about trading and getting more people to open live accounts and start thinking about trading. It was also aimed at improving innovation and bringing in fresh perspectives into a very competitive field.
There were a total of six YouTube episodes and real time updates on each decision that the contestants made. There was also an education section which attempted to simplify the technical aspects of trading in order to make it easier for people to understand the contestant’s decisions and additional mentor videos as well.
The competition was a great success. City Index posted their best ever figures for account openings and saw huge increments in their overall organic search rankings.
They received over 20 million impressions generated through their ‘#TradingAcademy’ Twitter feeds, over 1 million views across all content channels, more than 67,000 clicks generated through their Twitter feed and a remarkable 1443 percent increase in social referral visits.
The numbers, in the present case, are not ambiguous and speak unequivocally the importance of content marketing. If you’re wondering how you can promote your business using content marketing, there are a plethora of opportunities to choose from. You could set up blogs, YouTube videos with relevant content, start social media forums and revitalize your existing digital marketing strategy by adding fresh perspectives and socially relevant visuals.
Internet has helped revolutionize communications and advertising and marketing are at very basic levels, communication. Businesses have to realize the importance of content marketing and create marketing strategies keeping in mind that a significant portion of their audience can be reached most effectively through it.
So, if Content Marketing is not at the forefront of your Digital Marketing priorities, you may want to rethink and have it on top of your Marketing Agenda.
We hope this information has been useful to you. If you’d like to talk to us about creating effective Content Marketing for your business give us a call on +44 845 2264 247 or email us at mail@marketingfundamentals.com
Best regards,
Marketing Fundamentals Team
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