One of the hottest buzzwords in the business world today is the term, “content marketing,” but what does it mean?
In short, content marketing is the creation and distribution of useful and informative content to your current and prospective customers, which educates them about who you are, what you offer and why it is useful to them.
It is a practice that is a critical part of any company’s digital marketing strategy. Most business owners know how important it is to have an online presence, so most now have websites as well as create content for their company blog.
Is Content Marketing New?
In the past, it was enough to have a company website and blog with some SEO content to make certain that your company could be easily found online on the first page of search results. This raised interest and awareness about your company and its products while increasing traffic to your website and your sales. However, this is no longer true.
As more companies have entered the online space, potential clients and customers have become more adept than ever at filtering out ads, and pitches. Just as our DVRs automatically filter the commercials from our favourite programs, our minds now automatically filter out most blatant marketing efforts to tempt us to buy, opt in, or otherwise engage with a specific company.
Take a look at this clip from Content Marketing Institute which shows how content marketing began.
To be successful in the online space now, companies must regularly create and post content that is engaging, original, authoritative and provides value to current and potential clients. This content must use updated SEO Best Practices for search engine ranking, but it must also be content that delights and informs readers without appearing to sell anything.
Why is Content Marketing Important for Your Business?
Content marketing isn’t just about attracting new customers to your website and business, it is about delighting your current customers so that you retain them. It’s about creating original, captivating content that gets your customers to like and trust you enough so that they continue to do business with you in the future, and possibly expand the amount of business that they complete with you. It’s about presenting this content in such a way that it can easily be shared with your current customer’s friends and contacts so that they also have the opportunity to see how knowledgeable, engaging and helpful you and your company are so that they like you and consider doing business with you as well.
The Interdependence of Content Marketing and SEO
The original SEO best practices that everyone was using so effectively a few years ago continue to change as well. Since search engines such as Google continue to refine the algorithms that they use to rank websites, what worked 2 years ago or even 6 short months ago has changed and will continue to change with each new update. Not only is there now a growing emphasis being placed on the need for original, creative content, now customers want the ability to share this content on their various social media networking sites. Now, companies must use specialised SEO techniques to ensure that they are reaching and gaining traction with their target market.
Businesses must constantly invest time and money to regularly update their content and other marketing strategies to ensure that their site isn’t penalized by Google or another search engine, while also remaining interesting and relevant to members of their target market.
The Biggest Content Marketing Challenge for Business Owners
Obviously, staying on top of all of the trends and updates while creating unique, helpful, interesting content on a regular basis is quite the time consuming, difficult task. Even when someone is a talented writer, most business owners simply don’t have the time to spend composing articles and blog posts, while also making regular social media posts on the major social media networks and conducting their actual business operations. Thankfully you don’t have to deal with this hassle, unless you really want to. At Clever Streak we offer an easy, trustworthy solution to all of your content marketing needs.
How We Can Help You
We can help you with all aspects of content marketing. Common areas that we gladly handle for our clients include managing and optimizing your various social media profiles on networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth. We can also help to spread the word about your business via our press release service. We offer full SEO copywriting services such as optimizing your existing online content and creating compelling articles and blog posts. We can assist you with any content marketing related task, no matter how big or small the job might be. Contact us today and let us help you put an end to struggling for the right words to write.