Content marketing is the effective content creation, distribution, or redistribution of content with the intention of attracting new business.

Content is what captures and holds the attention of your target audience between the time they become aware of you and your business and the time they decide to do business with you.

What is Content Marketing?

So, what is content marketing? How is it done? Is it worth implementing? Will it work for your business? Is content marketing better than other forms of marketing?

1. Content marketing is the creation and distribution of information or media usually with the goal of developing a relationship with a company’s ideal prospective client / buyer in order to build brand awareness and increase the likelihood of some sort of business exchange
2. Content marketing is done by knowing what gets an ideal prospective client to act and creating + distributing effective content onto the channels that they’re most likely to consume that content on
3. Content marketing is 110% worth implementing. It’s the next phase of marketing in this stage of the internet and its development
4. According to First Page Strategy, content marketing is 3X more effective than any traditional marketing method available (tv, radio, newspaper, etc.)
5. Content marketing is almost impossible to fail at and is one of (if not THE) the most effective marketing strategies any business of any size in any industry can use and get high returns from utilizing (if done effectively and consistently over time)

With that said, let’s dive right into:

Is Content Marketing Effective? How? Why?

Content is the relationship development aspect of sales in the digital world. It reduces skepticism, instills confidence, builds relationships/trust with your audience and most of all, heightens the possibility of someone doing business with you and your business.

When was the last time you bought something online the first time you saw it without researching it or having any clue as to whether or not it would be beneficial to your life and accomplishing your goals in some way?

You probably can’t think of the last time that happened (if it has at all).

We all look up information about everything before we consider spending our hard earned cash on it.

Consumers now more than ever prefer to get to know a brand through content over direct ads any day of the week. In fact, I would go as far as saying most have gotten sick of the ads they’re being shown online. There are obviously exceptions to this but ads are usually perceived as annoying and something to avoid. Content also enables you to be found for the content that you create as well when people search for things related to what you discuss in your content.

One of the greatest things about the content you create and use to develop relationships online with is that the digital content assets are something that will forever be yours to use and market with and have no cost associated with using them after being created initially.

And there’s no rules that say you can’t use the same article, video, image or other content asset more than once on social channels. Meaning you could create one piece of content and then promote it once every 3 months on each social channel.

Not only can you reuse content, but you can repurpose it for hitting different objectives you may have or even just because you want to test which format / version of the asset drives the most ROI for your business.

Another benefit of it is the fact that it can’t be duplicated or used by anyone else. It’s a huge brand differentiator. Google will recognize anyone who tries to copy or use your content and demote their website for it.

So, to sum it all up, content marketing is essentially just the creation and distribution of information or content that your target audience would find:

• Educational/helpful (to help them reach a goal of theirs)
• Inspirational (inspiring or motivating them in some way shape or form)
• Entertaining (enjoyable content that

There are more types of content but these are typically the 3 general categories that content falls under which are listed above.

All of these types of content add value to the lives of your target audience in some way or another and should be used in different ways based on your goals and objectives.

Create and Distribute Unique & Quality Content

When you create content, you obviously need to make sure that it falls in line with what your target audience would want to consume. It should help them in some way shape or form or again, entertain them until they decide to move towards the more informative / helpful content.

This is all hard to know and understand at first but the more you create, distribute and get feedback, the better you get at creating highly valuable content that your audience will enjoy consuming.

Huge media companies (CNN, Fox News, etc.) are examples of at scale content marketing (although, their audience is the masses so their content marketing strategy is going to differ from yours or any other business’s).

The reason they always show up at the top of pages or news is because they have been doing content marketing at scale for so long that they have built up authority in Google’s eyes. You can do the same thing. But you need to make sure you are always pushing out content just like they are.

Content is King. And it will continue to be for quite some time (probably till we’re cyborgs and our thoughts trigger searches in the internet and we automatically get read back the answer to our questions that we were thinking).

Your goal as a company should be to eventually have your audience (social media followers, email subscribers, YouTube subscribers, clients, etc.) waiting to hear from you about what you are doing in your company, what new projects you’re working on, what new information you may have found out about a certain topic, and a plethora of other kinds of information or content.

This is the best it can get and when it does, you’re going to be absolutely floored at how much revenue you see coming in from the compound effect impacting you and your business’s growth over time. But again, this is a long term play. Not something to use to make a quick buck or reach your quarterly sales goals.

The Higher the Quality of Your Content, The Higher the Quality of Leads

The kind of content that you create and distribute will obviously determine the outcome and the return you get from it. The internet doesn’t need another blog post or another video.

What the internet and the people on it need more of is actionable content that they can use to achieve a certain outcome, goal, or objective in their lives. The better content and information you have available about a specific topic that you specialize in or have specific knowledge about, the more likely you are to be trusted and used as a business when compared to a competitor of yours that provides similar services or products as you do. This is ESPCIALLY true in the B2B space.

Eventually, content will (and is already starting to) be what determines which companies dominate in the different verticals / industries.

The volume and quality of inbound leads inquiring about your products or services is directly correlated to the quality and quantity of content you have available online and the effectiveness of its distribution methods. This doesn’t mean just on your website either, this means having it easily accessible on your social channels where people are already spending time and attention in. We’ll get into that in a bit.

But the bottom line is content marketing has a VERY long lasting compounding effect on your business and its bottom line and should be taken seriously if you want to to see serious results coming in from it.

Other Benefits of Content Marketing (besides leads and sales)

Content marketing helps gain authority and respect from both Google and anyone that comes in contact with your content. But on top of that, it helps a TON with SEO which you can learn more about by clicking on the link. But all that you really need to know is that the more information you have with keywords in it, the higher the odds are of you ranking on the first page of Google when people search for information, services or products related to the content you have online.

Another big one that it helps with is internal operations and increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of just about every customer facing employee.

As a business owner or leader, you know that prospective clients or customers have tons of questions, doubts, and worries (some that they don’t even know how to articulate) that need to be handled before proceeding to have any kind of business relationship develop. Or maybe they have questions posed after the relationship has been formalized and resources have been exchanged.

In either case, they want their concerns recognized, understood and put to rest. And one of the most validating and time saving things that employees (admin, sales, support, etc.) can do when someone shows concern of any kind about anything is send over a link to the person’s email or phone that takes them to a piece of content that answers their exact question and any others that may be similar to the topic they’re showing concern about.

This saves time internally and lets your team focus on their highest value tasks. Any time anyone expresses a worry, concern, or has a question about anything we do or have done, it gets documented and used later to create content that helps reduce time wasted on common concerns, questions, etc.

How You Can Improve Your Content Marketing for Your Business

When you consider who it is that you want to consume your content and sell more stuff to, you have to consider where they’re hanging out at already and the groups or communities that they’re already involved in on other platforms.

When you visit a website of any kind (besides social media sites), it’s typically pretty boring. There aren’t any of your friends there looking at it with you and discussing how cool newfound information is or its different applications and uses it may have. It’s just you.

This is why it’s vital to your content marketing strategy to not only create the content and have it available on your website for visitors to see and learn from. You also need to make sure that content is constantly being distributed on the platforms and social channels that already have your target audience’s attention captive.

No one wants to leave LinkedIn or Facebook to go watch your video hosted on your website. They want to consume the content on their feed, interact with it, and get back to scrolling.

As soon as a link is posted to any outside channel it’s demoted by almost all social media algorithms. And if it’s not obvious why, the more time you or anyone else spends on their platform, the more ads they can show, the more money they make and the more data they collect, and more accurate their algorithms get at future predictions.

So, making sure you have a steady stream of content being distributed onto the channels where your ideal clients are hanging out and interacting with one another is essential to a good content marketing strategy. One thing to keep in mind when approaching this is that you don’t start off with lots of eyeballs, likes, comments or any other type of interaction on your posts. You’ll have to build up your authority and credibility on the platform(s) over time just like with Google.

Recap of Advantages That Come From Using Content Marketing in Your Business

To wrap this up, let’s just brief over the advantages of using content marketing in your business

• maximize the likelihood of acquiring clients looking for services you provide
• dramatically increase retention rates
• plummet the cost of acquiring a client
• increase your following on social platforms content is being distributed to
• increase the LTV (lifetime value) of your clients/customers
• It’s free to create and distribute, making it’s effectiveness much higher than most methods

There are obviously more that we could list here but these are the reasons most businesses we work with decide to pull the trigger with content marketing and integrating it into their overall marketing strategy.

If you’re interested in learning more about how content marketing can help your business grow, feel free to schedule a call with us to see how we may be able to help you reach your goals using content and its effective distribution.

If we don’t hear from you about the possibility of us helping your business, we hope to hear about you crushing your goals and growing your business using this new information! Go crush it!