Content Marketing: The New Realm of Marketing
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What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing – one of the buzzwords seen and heard so often, even marketers themselves do not understand what it really means. Over the past decade, a number of marketing trends have either emerged or grown more prevalent. Content Marketing is certainly at the top of the list of growth areas in marketing activities. Rather than re-inventing a whole new definition of Content Marketing, let’s look at how the experts at Content Marketing Institute define it.
Content Marketing can come in many shapes and forms and is often considered “soft selling” which focuses on providing valuable content and educating your customers. It taps into the early stages of consumers’ buying process: raising awareness, educating, recognising a need, comparing and evaluating alternatives.
Content Marketing helps you to stand out from your competition; by allowing you to freely exhibit your unique selling point, establish relationships and create aspirations for your brand.
Storytelling for an Effective Content Marketing
Storytelling is a way to share original content and connect with your readers using emotions. It grabs the attention of your readers, establishes empathy for your brand and creates an emotional bond. By incorporating storytelling into your content, you break away from traditional marketing.
Take, for instance, OSIM. OSIM is no longer a company that sells massage chairs, it promotes positive health and well-being through its products.
“The brand name OSIM is based on the name of our founder Mr Ron Sim, with the “O” symbolising the globe. The icon of a person represents the focus of OSIM as a customer-centric brand. The icon’s vibrant glow signifies OSIM Inspiring customer’s well-being and helping its customers to feel great (on the inside) and look good (on the outside). OSIM is about the experience of total well-being.”
Is there a difference between Content Marketing and Traditional Marketing?
You bet!
Content Marketing is not only cheaper as they can be used over a longer period of time. Often, they are more appreciated and well-liked by audiences with the ability to connect and engage with potential customers. These contents are usually searched by interested users and consumed whenever they feel like it. It’s important for us to point out that content marketing, like blogs, take time to generate engagement and exposure. It usually takes about 1 year before you start seeing significant ROI for your organic content marketing efforts. Once that’s over, you’ll never regret starting it.
Traditional Marketing on the other hand often interruptive, aims to provide exposure to a wider group of audience with targeted objectives such as product selling or promotions with the intention of raising brand awareness.
Popular Channels of Content Marketing:
Like we said, content marketing is much cheaper as compared to traditional methods. There’s a lexicon of channels which your business can use to promote its products. Not all channels are created equal so it’s better to choose those which your audiences are typically using. Wildfire Maguire has a quick article that discusses how to use content marketing channels for your business. on Notice that we did not put LinkedIn as one of the popular channels. We feel that for small businesses, it is a very expensive platform to place advertisements and requires an experienced marketer to conduct thorough A/B testing before actually gathering solid leads.
Here’s a compiled list of popular content marketing channels:
Popular Channels of Traditional Marketing:
Don’t get us wrong though, traditional marketing still has its place in the world of marketing. Cold calling is still effective for businesses like the Insurance industry. In some cases, content marketing helps support your traditional marketing approaches. If your company has seen success in traditional methods, use content marketing to help support them. A mix-bag of content and traditional marketing works very well for most businesses. Digital Agency Network (DAN) talks a lot more about mixing channels in detail.
Here’s a compiled list of popular traditional marketing channels:
Rise of Digitalisation
With the rapid growth of digital technology, consumers are always hungry for information with the option of accessing them anytime they want. Businesses are streamlining every step of consumer behaviour and their business model from traditional to digital. It’s the kind of accessibility that has changed consumer buying behaviour and habits. Today, Content Marketing matters a lot to consumers, they want good and relevant content that helps make good decisions without being sold to. Consumers are drawn to Content Marketing and are less responsive to Traditional Marketing.
Closing Thoughts
Content Marketing is powerful. Effective content can help you build customer relationships while avoiding less-effective and expensive “hard selling”. Well-crafted content generates the most traffic to your website and social media accounts, inspires purchases, engages with your audience and give them the opportunity to share your content with their friends.
Talk to you soon!
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Drive more sales with great content
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