Conquer Content Marketing and You Win!
The buzz for 2013 has focused on the necessity for content marketing to be a crucial aspect in your online marketing efforts moving forward. This might be a term you’ve heard but not know precisely just what it means. Content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and publishing fresh content for your visitors. This manifests in a variety of forms, from seemingly simple blog posts, to articles, reports, whitepapers, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, and more. We live in a society that craves information, and the more of it you can provide visitors to your sites, the greater authority you will earn in not just their eyes, but also the search engines as well. They can then reward you with higher rankings, more traffic, links, and sales.
Content marketing is getting ever more popular!
According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses anticipate doing an increased level of content marketing. Just 4 percent are not. Many reasons exist for this, among them cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize many different mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post can be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Repurposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. In addition, this can easily happen often, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite swiftly.
A real-world example of how content marketing can rock your sales
The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that was watching as their sales tanked due to the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now impossible. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan embarked on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and in just a short time had not only recovered but surpassed pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!
Content marketing can and really should be a major piece of your online marketing strategy for 2013. The great thing is that it’s all within your control!
