A generation Z, or new consumers, in addition to being extremely connected, are looking for personalized experiences and conscious consumption!
In that aspect, the content marketing can help your company – a lot – to win over and retain these and other consumers. Find out how!
Content Marketing: What is it?
Before fully understanding its importance, it is necessary to remember what is content marketing.
Basically, it consists of creating relevant content aimed at the interests of your ideal client, that is, your person.
The big difference in your strategy is that you talk about your brand, product or service, but without doing so directly. After all, no one likes to be bombarded with sales pitches all the time, right? That's a thing of the past and when we use the product or service offer directly, it's at the right moment in the customer's purchasing journey.
But then, how do you do this? Content marketingo will be focused on creating materials such as e-books, blog texts, videos, infographics, manuals and even posts on social media.
And all this material, as mentioned above, will talk about topics that are related to your product or service, but without necessarily mentioning them. You will demonstrate that your company is an authority on the subject and is willing to help that customer with their “pain”.
Anyone who believes that content marketing emerged in the digital age is mistaken. When cans of condensed milk displayed delicious recipes on the back of the label, they were already doing content marketing. And doing it very well.
What has changed over time are the channels and the possibility of new formats, but the concept and objective are the same.
Let's look at some examples!
Content Marketing: Examples
If you are a plastic surgeon, for example, in addition to offering appointment scheduling, how about producing materials that answer the main questions of your potential patients – for example: types of prosthetics, pre and post-surgical care, types of scars and much more!
Just understand which channels your target audience is on and get to work!
Some content marketing tools like Similarweb, SemRush or Google Trends are very useful for finding out what topics are trending and the questions your audience is asking online. It's a good idea to start by answering these questions.
Content Marketing: How Does It Work?
When we talk about how to do it digital marketing industry, which is to use digital channels to attract new business and create relationships, we will also hear about Inbound Marketing.
And what is Inbound Marketing? It is precisely a set of actions to gain the interest of the public through quality content, leading them through a funnel until the moment of purchase. And content marketing is included within these actions.
Content marketing is a way to connect with your leads and convert them into customers, making them reach your sales funnel in a more natural way.
Companies send all kinds of information to potential customers as a way to generate sales, but what is important about all of this? What will solve a problem for that lead?
Therefore, the content marketing strategy is to create offers and rich content that interests your target audience, content that can help solve that lead's problem.
And you may ask me why it is necessary to do this? Because it is through proximity and improving the relationship with your leads that they can become customers and your company can sell more. And that is the function of content marketing.
Nowadays, a large part of the population is present on the internet, and if they do not shop online, they use the internet to obtain valuable information about what they want to buy in physical stores or even online.
In other words, everyone goes through the virtual network and 70% of the purchasing process has already been completed before the sale itself. People research and want to know before making a decision.
So what do you do? First, offer something, such as information on topics that will interest them, which can be distributed by creating a successful blog on your website. In fact, creating a blog is a key step in distributing this content.
For example, in a wedding invitation company, whose leads are brides, offering more information on how to address wedding invitations, how to make the guest list, tips on types of invitations for each style of wedding or even types of paper for envelopes, will be of great interest to those who are engaged or intend to get engaged.
This makes it much easier to retain and convert that lead into a customer because it generates credibility when your company shows that it knows the subject. It also builds relationships as you offer content that can help that lead solve their problems.
In addition to blog posts, content marketing is also done through e-books and other rich materials. In fact, it is through these rich materials that you will obtain information from this “potential client”, transforming them into a lead and then “refining” the information from this lead to be able to segment them more and more to the point of knowing exactly what their “pain” is and what your company can offer to help them.
Content Marketing Strategy: Where to Start?
So much information can be a bit overwhelming at first. That’s why we’ve decided to share some tips to help you get started with content marketing for companies:
- Find out who your persona is
Do you know what is persona? In short, it represents your ideal customer. It will bring together all the characteristics of the main buyers of your product or service.
And knowing who your customer is makes it easier to create a connection with them and attribute value to what you are offering.
- Plan ahead and create quality content
Be authentic and show that you are an authority on the subject! Show how your company can help them and build a relationship with them.
This will be crucial in generating leads.
Organization is also an ally, because through a content schedule, it will be easier to plan what type of content will be distributed in which format on each of the channels your brand operates on.
- Optimize your content
Use techniques of SEO will make more people find your content in the vastness known as the internet.
This will help the algorithm rank your content and place it among the top results when someone searches for the topic you wrote about.
What are contents or what types can they be?
Marketing content is not just texts, but also videos that are interesting to your target audience, such as tutorials. You know, those that teach you how to do different things, from makeup to surfboards?
Infographics, e-books, podcasts, social media posts, surveys and even quiz content are valid formats for distributing content, that is, the message you want to convey to your audience, your community.
There are countless ways to distribute content that can be used to build relationships with leads. It takes a little creativity and innovation to stand out on an internet that is already full of content.
Nowadays, the big difference is the quality of the content and the creativity to present it in a creative and different way.
Marketing: content for all sizes
The most interesting thing today is that companies of all sizes are using content marketing.
To give you an idea, data from E-commerce Trends showed that e-commerces that adopt Content Marketing have twice as many visitors and 2 times more customers when compared to those that do not adopt it.
Want some examples of companies that have blogs? The giant multinational beauty company Avon has a blog to communicate more closely with its consumers.
Or Natura, from the same sector, which also created a blog to talk more closely with its consultants on topics such as promotions, launches, social responsibility, business tips, among other topics.
And so do Red Bull, Magazine Luiza, McDonald's, Walmart, and many others.
And if large corporations haven’t been left out of a successful strategy, why shouldn’t small and medium-sized companies take advantage of it?
Want to see? A company that has a blog and makes more than 13 posts per month can have its views increased by 4,2 times and get five times more leads, in addition to generating twice as much traffic to their websites.
Furthermore, content marketing also helps reduce your customer acquisition costs. Want a more compelling reason to invest in this strategy?
But you need to be an expert in what you do, you need to take care of your product, create attractive content, with good images and good text, ask what your audience wants to know and understand their expectations, as well as encourage comments.
Rest assured that this way you will be much closer to him.
So, regardless of which tactics you use, content marketing should be one of them.
Content Marketing: The Currency of the 21st Century
It is already clear that those who do not invest in Inbound Marketing and, consequently, in content marketing, will be left behind, among so many competitors.
If you need help with content marketing strategies in digital marketing, contact GS2 Marketing Digital and boost your sales!