Leverage Visual Marketing To Dominate Your Content Marketing Goals
Inbound and outbound content marketing is crucial to the success of any company. Many traditional forms of advertising are dead and gone and in their place is content marketing, which engages the consumer rather than pointing a finger at them, making them feel they are being forced or persuaded to purchase a product. Content marketing tells and shows consumers why they need your product and gets them to come to you on their own terms.
When establishing a startup, content marketing will play a vital role from the very beginning. If you leave content marketing out of the mix during the early stages of operating your business, it will suffer on a long-term basis. You may still be able to secure a few clients, but you’ll be hurting your bottom line by not meeting your full sales revenue potential. If you’re wondering how can content marketing build business, then you’ll definitely want to explore these four reasons to gain a better understanding.
Puts Your Name In Front of the Right Audiences
You can have the intention of selling your product to a wide range of consumers, but unless they actually need your product, you’re wasting marketing resources. This is why you need to ask yourself “who are the people who need my product?” In doing this, you’ll be able to develop buyer personas and identify your targeted audiences. This will help you build a business from the ground up because you will know from the beginning that your marketing dollars and resources are being directed in the right direction.
Creating buyer personas for content marketing purposes is much different than it is for traditional marketing methods. It used to be that pinpointing the basic demographics of a persona was good enough — gender, age, income, and location. With content marketing, though, you focus in more detail on the person in addition to his or her demographics — special interests, accomplishments, marital status, buying and social media habits, etc. In building this type of persona, you can actually see a picture of your targeted audience, including who they are, common occupations they work in, what they do in their free time, and how their family relationships impact their daily lives. Knowing these details allows you to create content that highly resonates and appeals to them in a way that entices them to reach out to you.
Drives Sales
On average, content marketing accounts for 25 to 40 percent of businesses’ marketing budgets. These companies allocate such a large portion of their budgets to this form of marketing because they experience how content marketing drives their sales.
When looking for tools that improve the sales process, you’re going to be bombarded with options. Three of the more popular options include BI integrations, database management software, and marketing automation platforms. Even though these tools can prove effective in reaching the objective of improving sales, many marketing experts agree nothing drives sales like quality content. If you’re distributing poor or irrelevant content, there is no form of technology that can help you. A successful business starts with quality content and it ends with quality content. The latest tech products are simply there to boost content marketing efforts.
According to Forbes, the average sales cycle is 3.5 months long. It is during this time that content marketing steps up to the plate and hits a home run. As your targeted audience is identifying their problem, you will already have content in place that outlines why your product serves as a solution. This information can be presented to them in the form of emails, blog postings, case studies, and eBooks. The consumer will be conducting research on the problem and will come across your content, making it appear as if they are actually reaching out to you rather than you pushing your product in their face. Content marketing drives sales in an organic manner and is unlike any other form of advertising.
It is essential that you start creating content as soon as your company is up and running because the more content you distribute, the more likely you are to reduce the time of the sales cycle. More so, according to the Demand Gen’s 2016 Content Preference Report, three pieces of content are consumed by 80 percent of B2B buyers before they come into contact with a salesperson. You want to make sure your company has enough content distributed to meet consumers’ research preferences.
Impacts Your Bottom Line
We just stated that flooding the Internet with content is paramount to meeting consumers’ research preferences, but you have to make sure it is quality content. It’s better to publish four quality blog postings each month rather than 20 postings that provide no real value and don’t engage the reader. Either way you go about it, though, content marketing impacts your bottom line, so you want to make sure it impacts it in a positive manner.
The goal of content marketing is to establish a voice for your company. In doing this, you distinguish yourself from your competitors and help targeted audiences understand why they should choose your brand. The content you distribute on your site plays the most crucial role in establishing your voice. It needs to provide value to the readers’ lives, which will not only cause them to return to your site in the future, but it also influences them to share your content. As they share your content, your brand awareness increases, which, of course, impacts your bottom line in a positive light.
When you prioritize on-site content, this means you focus on creating content on a regular basis. Ideally, you will want to publish at least one blog posting a week. The more, the better, but just make sure it’s quality content. And remember, there are many other content forms you can publish on your site, including case studies, white papers, and infographics, all of which can be posted under your blog section.
Influences Business Objectives
Content marketing can help build your business from the ground up because it allows you to better meet your objectives. Your top three objectives should be to boost brand awareness, engage targeted audiences, and instill trust. Content marketing helps you achieve these goals by letting consumers know who you are and what you have to offer. It enables you to put your content in front of targeted audiences at the right time during the sales funnel. And most importantly, it provides a method for engaging with audiences and letting them see that your brand is trustworthy. Once you meet these objectives, your brand becomes a go-to source for advice and information. Not only will you be gaining profit from your customers but you’ll be gaining their loyalty as well.
It all starts with credible and relevant content. From the ground up, content marketing establishes you as a reputable brand that can provide a solution to the needs of your audience.
IGW is the B2B marketing agency you need to accomplish your goals. Contact us to talk further.
Leverage Visual Marketing To Dominate Your Content Marketing Goals