This nice blog post on Entrepreneur lists different types of content marketing as infographics, newsletters, ebooks, videos, case studies and blog posts and information articles and then goes on to explain how content marketing helps you create brand loyalty.
The problem when it comes to small businesses is that most of the people think that content marketing means improving your search engine rankings. Yes, constant publishing does improve your search engine rankings especially when you don’t go overboard with your keywords and stick to creating quality content, but this is just one aspect of content marketing. This is how the Entrepreneur blog post defines Content Marketing:
Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that utilizes valuable and relevant content, adjacent to the business’s mission and brand, to draw in and enhance customer buying behavior and brand loyalty.
Three phrases are very important when it comes to executing a successful content marketing strategy:
- Long-term implementation
- Valuable and relevant content
- Drawing people to your website or blog instead of barging into their personal space
Long-term implementation
You cannot execute a content marketing strategy in a couple of weeks or even a couple of months. It’s an ongoing process. Why is it an ongoing process?
Because everybody is a content publisher these days. You’re competing with 100s of businesses using content marketing as their main marketing tool. They are constantly reaching out to their target audience and if they are constantly reaching out, you also need to constantly reach out. Otherwise you will be left behind – whether you want to improve your search engine rankings or attract people on social networking websites. It needs to be a constant effort because you’re competing with multiple businesses at the same time. If you can outdo your competitors in perseverance, you will emerge victorious.
Valuable and relevant content
There is lots of junk content on the Internet because, fortunately for those who get content marketing, there are very few who understand the power of valuable and relevant content. Most of the people just want to fill up their websites and blogs with lots of content and most of this content is useless. It is mostly created hoping that it would improve search engine rankings. Does it?
In some cases yes, it does, but eventually better content wins. So don’t worry about creating lots of content, worry about creating valuable and relevant content.
Drawing people to your website or blog instead of barging into their personal space
Nobody likes to be disturbed. You must have noticed that now that we can do it, we quickly fast forward ads while watching interactive television. Even on YouTube you must have seen that after 5 seconds there is an option to skip the ad. 99.99% people use this option. It’s like throwing money down the drain. The more you interrupt people to push your product or service, the more averse they get to the idea of doing business with you.
Valuable content on the other hand people want to access on their own. They seek out such content.
Suppose someone is desperate to improve his email marketing conversion rate. He is either looking for someone who can help him or some useful content he can use to improve the conversion rate on his own. Suppose there is a good blog post on my website that explains, step-by-step, how one can improve email marketing conversion rate. Now, even if you stop that person from coming to my website, if he thinks that the information contained within the blog post is really valuable to him, nothing is going to stop him from coming to my website. You may think that he will use the information, improve his conversion rate, and forget about my website. Maybe that will be the case.
How persistent content marketing creates brand loyalty
But the next time he comes across somewhat similar content, somewhere else, from my website, he will immediately recall that help was available on my website when he really needed it. This increases my brand loyalty. The next time if he needs or if someone else he knows needs me he is going to contact me because using my information, he was able to improve his conversion rate.
By regularly creating helpful content you provide solutions to people that they may not find elsewhere and even if they find them elsewhere, the solutions are not as helpful as the ones available on your website or blog. When people come to your website by making an effort, when, as they have expected, they find high-quality, relevant and helpful content on your website, and when they understand that you’re going to provide high-quality content on an ongoing basis, you begin to experience brand loyalty. Your regular visitors become your evangelists. They will defend you. They will insist that people do business with you. They will promote your services and products on their own, sometimes, without even realizing.