The age of merely pitching your products and services is over. Prospects and customers are looking for real solutions to their problems and expert marketers are providing relevant and useful information to help solve their issues, rather than engaging in a sales pitch. It comes in the form of content marketing services.
What is Content Marketing and Why Do I Need Content Marketing Services?
Content marketing is the sharing of online meaningful information that doesn’t explicitly promote a brand but rather intends to stimulate engagement and interest in products or services. With several types of content marketing to choose from, the right mix of content can increase traffic, boost conversions, and increase sales, at a lower cost than traditional marketing strategies.
To effectively manage this type of strategy, you’ll need expert content marketing services by industry veterans.
Social Media Content Marketing
With over four billion social media users, it’s obvious why so many businesses invest in a social media content strategy. Whether it’s a business platform like LinkedIn or a social platform like Instagram or Snapchat, there are various ways to create and share photos, videos, stories, and live streams to drive interest.
Infographics
Ideal for quick and easy consumption, infographics display data in a bold, simple, easy-to-understand graphic format. They’re a great way to get complicated information boiled down to a digestible piece of information that all audiences can understand.
Blogs
A creative way to connect with your prospects, blogs allow for long-form storytelling and a variety of topics and purposes. Add in external links, social share buttons, and product information, and your content can get more exposure and reach a wider audience.
Podcasts
Similar to blog content, podcasts provide lots of flexibility and allow for creativity in engaging an audience. Podcasts are reaching their height in popularity, and businesses are quickly realizing the benefits of creating their own podcasts. Guest appearances, varied topic discussion, and episode length are all flexible variables that allow for several creative ways to connect with your target market.
Video Content
Whether it’s a how-to YouTube video or a viral video on Snapchat, video content still holds strong in creating relationships between your brand and a wide audience. Live videos also draw heavy engagement with viewers and provide an opportunity to answer questions and exchange in dialogue with your audience. On a more professional level, webinars can drive interest via specialized topics that are relevant to a niche audience. Keep in mind that you’ll need professional marketing content services to develop polished video content that represents your brand.
Interactive Content
Heavy engagement is the name of the game here. Content that drives interactivity creates more excitement and connection with your brand. Games, quizzes, interactive landing pages, polls, e-books, and online calculators are all ways to develop more leads and convert users to customers.
Content Marketing Trends
To maximize your opportunities to connect with your prospects, it’s important to jump on trends as they occur. A few trends are worth exploring:
Building Communities
Community Marketing is designed to bring people together, build trust, and reach a wide audience. Blogs, newsletters, and online social media groups can accomplish this rather easily.
The way in which YouTube, Flickr, and SlideShare are used to build communities has proven quite powerful. When users share their videos about your products, you get a wider reach to more prospects. Influencers excel in this area, and more businesses are taking advantage of the influencer trend to get the word out about their product or service.
Product Tie-ins
As companies continue to become leaner, we find that the focus is more on the bottom line. When it comes to content, this means placing it at the bottom of the sales funnel, with heavy tie-ins to products and services, or content closely related to it.
High-Quality SEO
As SEO goes, you’ll find is that a more specific search term yields more buyer intent. Longtail keywords make all the difference in leading people to your site via a narrower search term, offering more quality leads. Creating content based on longtail keywords will generate more interest, since people searching for exact terms are more likely to click on your link. Online tools like Ubersuggest, Google Suggest, and SEMrush make it easy to determine which search terms yield better Google rankings.
Making The Most of Your Content Marketing
To generate the best possible results, you’ll need a good content user experience. The way your audience interacts with your content determines quality, and if they love what they are experiencing or find what they are looking for, you’ll know you’ve hit the mark. Marketing funnels make this process efficient, and gentle calls to action sprinkled throughout it can seal the deal.
You also don’t need to re-invent the wheel with every piece of content. Convert content into different formats – turn blogs into newsletters, turn videos into podcasts or blogs, or create infographics from research. Repurposing content or using content to cross-promote other content across different channels is a great way to reach different audiences with the same goal in mind – reaching more people.
Content Marketing Tips
The ideal way to identify the most successful recipe is to measure your engagement. Find out what works and refine it to reach the maximum level of engagement. It’s an ongoing journey and will change over time, so regular analysis is crucial.
A team of people with highly diverse skill sets is needed to provide the best quality content marketing services to meet your audience’s demands. Skills like video production, graphic design, content optimization, SEO, branding, and skilled copywriting are all necessary.
Strategic Marketing provides content marketing services with a team of professionals that expertly create, optimize, and distribute your company’s content marketing strategy. With over 29 years in the marketing industry, we have stayed at the forefront of emerging strategies for business growth. Let us show you how working with us can improve your bottom line. Contact us today for all of your content marketing needs.
