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Content Marketing: What You Need to Know

Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Instead of pitching your products or services, you provide genuinely relevant and valuable content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.

Everything in marketing relies on your message. Strategic plans depend on your vision of what that message needs to be and how it should be shared with all of your stakeholders and prospects.

Content Marketing is Part of a Good Strategy

A good marketing strategy will help you focus on the right content to share with your readers. Providing exciting and helpful content pulls in your prospects and clients. It allows them to see you as the expert. You are the expert in your industry; let everyone know it.

How to Write a Marketing Strategy.

Does Content Marketing Work for B2B and B2C Businesses?

Content Marketing is essential to both B2B businesses and B2C businesses. When you develop your marketing strategy, think about the types of information that will help your target market. What knowledge would assist them in building their business? Where should you distribute this information? One way you can provide content is by creating your own and posting it on a blog.

B2B Blogging by The Numbers

Backlinko analyzed 502 B2B companies to understand better how they approach content marketing. They found out several interesting statistics regarding B2B usage of content marketing.

  • 72% of B2B companies have a blog.Put another way, 28% of B2B companies don’t have a blog.
  • B2B blogs that create education content receive 52% more organic traffic than those that mainly publish content about their company.
  • 65% of B2B companies use stock images in their blog posts.
  • 35% of companies used “subscribe to our newsletter” as a prominent call-to-action on their blogs.
  • 38% of B2B Company Blogs publish content to educate their audience
  • B2B Blogs get an average of 282 visits from organic search each month

Options for Circulating Your B2B Content

Blogs are important to B2B companies in their pursuit of disseminating content. They aren’t the only way, though. Social Media and Email Marketing are included prominently in good strategic marketing plans. The content used in posts and emails is a part of healthy Content Marketing tactics. It all works together. Once you create or find a piece of content, such as a business article, photo, video, meme, or other content, you want to make sure you broadcast it through all of your channels.

Why share it everywhere? Everyone has their favorite way of learning, educating themselves, and keeping abreast of trends and news. One person may like Twitter. Another person may prefer email. Yet another may like Facebook. If you only share your information in one place, you may miss out on the audience members that you want to reach.

Reinventing With Content: 3 Brands Find New Paths

It’s a Long-Term Commitment

Content Marketing isn’t an overnight answer to gain leads and build your brand. It’s a long-term strategy that focuses on building relationships with your target audience through valuable, relevant, and consistent content. Your goal should be to provide this high-quality, relevant content consistently.

Like all marketing, Content Marketing requires repetition and consistency. Over time you will reap the rewards from developing a direct communication channel with your clients and prospects to increase engagement. Long-term engagement leads to sales.

Do you want to create your own Content Marketing Plan? Contact us to see how.

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