Have you ever come across the phrase “content is king”? Content marketing used to be a means to differentiate yourself from your competition, but it has now become a must-have for any modern business.

Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Business

There has been a significant shift in customer behavior during the past decade, with consumers responding less to traditional advertising strategies. As a result of this trend, marketers are adapting and also shifting to newer, more effective forms of marketing.

These days the most successful digital marketing efforts have content marketing at their core. What distinguishes content marketing from more traditional strategies is that it enables companies to showcase their expertise, as well as their products, without coming across as excessively promotional.

Businesses can attract new leads by providing content on things that their target audience is interested in. People engage with the content and, in the process, connect with the businesses that can then convert them into customers. Pushing promotional content isn’t an effective tactic any longer.

Now companies increase their sales by creating original content that answers their audience’s questions and helps them solve specific problems.

If you’ve been wondering if content marketing is important for your business, the answer is an emphatic YES! The more useful your content is to your audience, the more likely they are to connect with your business.

The more time they spend engaging with your content, the more likely they are to trust your brand and become customers. You’ll get a solid return on your content marketing efforts.

What is Content Marketing?

If you ask ten content marketing specialists to explain their field, you’ll probably get ten different answers, but they’ll all point to the same underlying principle.

Content marketing refers to a marketing strategy that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing content to a target audience in order to increase a brand’s online presence, generate traffic, and attract new customers.

Let’s put it this way: Traditional marketing is all about telling the world that you’re amazing at what you do. Content marketing, on the other hand, is about proving it. This is usually done online through blogs, ebooks, videos, and social media.

As an example, suppose you’re a personal trainer whose business has plateaued in the last couple of years. You want to expand your client base. You create a blog and submit 2 to 3 keyword-optimized posts each week explaining how to get in shape, eat healthily, and lose weight.

Since they’re well-written and provide useful information, they start to rank in search engines. As summer approaches, more people search for ways to get ready for beach season, and they stumble upon your blog.

Some of them will keep returning to your blog because they find the information useful. And some of these readers will want to contact you and enroll in one of your training programs.

The ability to create high-quality content is a powerful tool, and when implemented correctly, content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract customers and grow your business.

Types of Content Marketing Formats

Choosing which format to use for content marketing can be tricky. There are quite a few to choose from. It all boils down to what works best for your company. Simply creating content is not enough. You have to make sure that the content benefits your audience and helps you gain their respect and trust.

Blog Posts

Blogs still make up the majority of content marketing since they’re very cost-effective and therefore ideal for small businesses with tight budgets.

Blogging, like most forms of content marketing, is most effective when used for good. What do we mean by that? Instead of writing about how your newest product is phenomenal and can change people’s lives, you want to focus on topics related to your products or services.

Google and many other companies offer tools that let you see what keywords are searched most often and what kind of questions your target audience is most interested in. You also have tools like PDFChef that can help you organize your research and drafts.

You can use it to merge or split PDF online so you can easily find information depending on the topic and angle you want for your content. You will write a lot of content on similar topics, so it’s better to keep everything organized for future reference.

With content marketing, the goal is not to push your products directly but to make your brand more recognizable and establish yourself as an industry expert.

Videos

Video content tends to be more expensive to make, but it’s very popular. Google owns YouTube, so it favors video content in its search results, plus people also prefer it because it’s more engaging.

It’s a very versatile medium. If your audience wants to learn how to do something practical like fix a sink, they will prefer to watch a video tutorial rather than read a blog post about it.

You can also publish videos on social media that give your target audience an intimate glimpse into your company’s culture and mission.

This goes a long way towards building trust.

You can create a wide range of content to engage your audience and leave them wanting more. Don’t forget to add captions to your videos and a brief introduction to help them find what they’re looking for.

This content can then be used practically anywhere, including your main website, blog, social media pages, and email campaigns. The use of videos on landing pages, for example, has been shown to raise conversion rates by more than 80%.

Social Media Content

Because it follows a slightly different set of principles than other forms of content marketing, social media is usually treated separately. Unlike the other digital marketing formats mentioned above, social media marketing is all about getting people to engage with your content.

It may take some time and effort to identify the type of content and medium that truly resonates with your social media followers, but the good news is that you can easily repurpose the blog posts and videos you’re already making and adapt them to social media.

By keeping a close eye on your social media analytics, you’ll be able to determine whether your audience enjoys videos or blogs, serious articles from your CEO, or humorous ones from your staff writers. You’ll also be able to see how much traffic social media drives to your site.