How Effective is Content Marketing?

The success of marketing is inevitably linked to digital marketing today. Digital transformation has brought in several innovations in terms of marketing and challenged conventional marketing. However, when it comes to content marketing, it is not a brand new concept. Content has been a part of marketing since the very inception. But, it was limited.

With the increase in the usage of online devices and an increase in the content available to users, marketers prompted brand through content. It has become an important aspect of every dimension of digital marketing from SEO to SMM. But, how effective is this?

Does this content allow your business to stand out among millions of others? Or, is it just a hype?

This skepticism stopped many businesses to implement content marketing strategies to boost their business. They were concerned about the effectiveness of content marketing.

What if we tell you, “Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less”. (CMI) Yes, this is true. How? We shall discuss now.

Original Content is the KING  

Content is an asset to the business. You may wonder why. Content adds more potential to your business. And. when it is unique, it brings wonders to the overall performance of the company. Different from outbound marketing, the content remains forever on the website. Once created, it allows to get conversions to the website for forever.

Content has to be unique and new, no one wants to see something that’s already been all over the place. How does it stand among the others? The answer is simple, it needs to be original.

Moreover,  it has an SEO dimension to it. It is significantly important to your website optimization. The sole mission of Google is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. In order to get the rank on the Google pages, it is crucial that use something unique and add value to the existing content.

It vice versa when using plagiarized, your rank on Google goes very low ( a push into purgatory) and it is inexistent to your customers. Using original content gives you a unique stand in the digital world.

Content Cuts Costs

Content marketing reduces exorbitant costs involved in the traditional marketing. It increases sales and also builds trust among the customers on your brand. It is reported that content marketing reduces up to 60 per cent of costs involved in the conventional route to acquiring customers.

It does not “push” the audience, rather entices and pulls them towards your products and services. The key to this is to focus on what your customers look for.

In other words, your content marketing strategy becomes the guide to drive your business growth. A clear and detailed analysis of your audience can help you deliver precisely what they want.

Content Personalization

Every individual is different and so are their preferences. For instance, what happens when you take a customer looking for cats to a dogs pet supplies? It is obvious that the customer would leave the place.

This is what it appears to customers when he or she is constantly bombarded with information that is irrelevant to them. Thanks to the technology innovations like Machine Learning through data mining techniques, it enables content personalization.

This took content marketing to next level. It dynamically transformed the marketers approach to acquire a large number of customers. It is noted that content marketing integrated with personalization techniques is 48 per cent more effective than the regular approach. (Contently). No sooner, this would be more than 90 per cent in the coming years.

As the technology is in the process of evolution, personalized content marketing would need a few more years to show its accurate results.

Content Marketing Drives Customer Conversions

Customer conversion is the ultimate goal of effective marketing. Content marketing does it process efficiently. It increases brand recognition, forms a large customer base, guides the customers while purchasing and engages loyal customers.

One of the best examples to consider in this area is the e-commerce sector. The fast encroachment of the content marketing trends in e-commerce seemed surreal. But, it obtained exceptional results more than other industries. One such is Amazon.

“Amazon is the granddaddy of customer reviews that help customers make decisions, often with a variety of content formats. This content has the added benefit of supporting the search optimization to improve rankings at no additional cost!”

Solve the Dilemma

Not only B2C companies identified the transformation with content marketing, B2B observed a noticeable change in the performance. It is recorded that 42 per cent of B2B marketers are very committed to their content marketing strategies to determine value. They spent a significant amount of time in investigating the KPIs of content marketing and achieving the goals.

Businesses emphasized the latest content marketing trends to accelerate growth. And, boom!  It brought impeccable results that one could have done through other forms of marketing. Hence, making content “the atomic particle of marketing”.

Author
Ajay Sharma is a contributing editor at TechWebSpace. Ajay writes about organic and paid online marketing topics including PPC AdWords, and also writes about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world user behavior. He can be found on Twitter as @shandilyaajay.