Content marketing is the vehicle through which a brand’s voice can help customers better understand a firm’s value (i.e. why it’s beneficial) and values (what it believes in). What’s more, it helps businesses tap into consumer demand and tell stories that rally people behind their flags.
After all, in the all-out battle for customers’ hearts and attention, content marketing always leads the charge. And that’s a fight you always want to win.
What is content marketing?
Ask ten different experts for a definition and you’ll probably get ten different answers, but most will agree that content marketing isn’t just another buzzword. It’s much, much more than that.
Unlike other buzzwords, content marketing hasn’t co-opted into everyday speech and lost its value. For brands and businesses, it’s part of a well-structured process that engages and cultivates a strong customer base with high-quality content.
Companies build trust by outputting content that’s helpful to their customers and, to avoid alienating the latter, replace “sales” with “value” in the content marketing equation.
Read more about content marketing here.
What businesses can do with content marketing
A lot! Here are 10 benefits content marketing can yield for businesses large and small.
1. Reach target audiences
Pulling in targeted traffic requires personalized, valuable content that influences customers’ lives in unique ways. Defining a target market is a building block to success, and most content marketing platforms today feature engagement analytics to help businesses do exactly that. With usage insights, companies can target a specific consumer base, tailor content to different buyer personas, boost conversions, and conduct market trend analysis.
2. Build trust and meaningful relationships with customers
Trust is the lifeblood of brands, businesses, and relationships alike. Customers who trust your brand feel good about purchasing your products. Research shows that consumers rely more on emotions than information when evaluating a brand. Content marketing is inherently customer-centric and, by providing educational and valuable content, lends itself to making your brand more credible.
3. Build brand awareness
Who are you and what do you do? It’s the fundamental question brand awareness asks and it’s how businesses stand out in a sea of competitors. When pairing content marketing with brand awareness, the focus is on value, not selling. Branded blogs and newsletters, for example, are excellents ways to share original content that’s relevant to your customer’s needs (letting your brand’s personality shine through, too).
4. Improving Organic Search Rankings
Conductor’s study suggests that organic search traffic may be responsible for 64% of website traffic. With content marketing in full swing, brands can leverage data to create content that audiences care about. Effective content marketing improves the search rankings of your website on search engine results pages (SERPs) while proliferating your online visibility.
5. Generating leads
Lead generation has evolved into a web-centric process as people turn to Google first for answers and recommendations. Demand Metric estimates that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates at least 3 times as many leads. It’s extremely versatile and, depending on your choice of platform and content, different strategies can be used to capture valuable leads (i.e. interactive videos, presentations, quizzes, white papers, and eBooks).
6. Attracting real buyers
The sales cycle isn’t linear anymore. Tech-savvy consumers are self-educated and shopping from the convenience of their favorite devices. Content marketing attracts ideal buyers to your brand whenever they’re online and ready to shop. There’s nothing more frustrating than lost sales, but content marketing can lower the odds by generating higher quality, sales-ready leads.
7. Convert website visitors into leads
Websites are cost-effective ways to house products and services, but they’re also invaluable lead-generating assets. According to the Content Marketing Institute, nearly 90% of brands are using content marketing to grow their businesses and generate more leads.
8. Make content go viral
Viral content refers to any piece of online media that surges in popularity through social sharing and website links. Content that’s viral is the exception, not the norm, and exposes brands to new audiences they wouldn’t otherwise reach organically. It’s every marketer’s dream, and one content marketing can fulfill by leveraging the right distribution channels.
9. Build backlinks
Backlinks, also known as inbound links, are hyperlinks that link from one webpage back to your own. They’re important for SEO because they improve a website’s ranking in search engines. Content marketing is all about publishing high-quality content and encouraging others to link back to it.
10. Increase sales
A typical salesperson puts in work from 9 to 5, Monday-Friday. But content marketing is a 24/7 workhorse, guiding leads through the sales funnel when businesses are asleep. And since 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer reaches out to sales, content marketing can speed up the sales cycle by educating customers and building relationships before a rep even speaks to a prospect.
Finding a complete content marketing solution
Meet Joomag-- the content marketing platform that replaces conventional emails, spreadsheets, and other unintegrated tools to help businesses streamline their marketing activities. With Joomag, marketers can create interactive and highly engaging publications, including magazines, catalogs, brochures, newsletters, portfolios, flyers, booklets, user manuals, and photo albums.
Its multipurpose software automates marketing initiatives while improving distribution efficiency, allowing businesses to analyze content performance from one platform. And the results? Bigger and better content marketing.
Joomag’s Content Marketing Essentials
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Interactive content creation: Demand Metric’s survey reveals that interactive content can help with brand distinction, especially among immediate competitors. With Joomag, choose from over 300 templates, or upload a PDF file with pre-existing content. Then include interactive elements like video, audio, slideshows, and plugins to drive engagement and market your content the right way.
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Lead generation: create custom lead gen forms, including pop-ups and email subscription plugins, to capture leads directly from your content. Users can also manage contacts via Joomag’s proprietary Awesome CRM™.
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Distribution: distributing high-value content to the right people at the right time is a vital component of any content marketing strategy. Brands can leverage Joomag’s multichannel distribution network to deploy content across social media, company websites, blogs, custom domains, branded apps, and much more.
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Branding: personalize Joomag’s magazine viewer by changing its color, uploading custom themes, and adding logos. Order branded mobile apps for your content and include logos on checkout pages for ready-to-buy customers to admire.
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SEO: SEO and content marketing are two sides of the same coin. With Joomag’s SEO tool, publishers can choose specific text or keywords from their content for search engines to index through.
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Analytics: the right data can inform your content strategy and impact bottom lines. Mix and match insights with Joomag’s analytics, including pageviews, average session durations, link clicks, traffic insights, reader geolocations, and usage metrics for different mobile devices.
Examples of content marketing done right with Joomag's all-in-one platform
Enjoy Joomag’s full collection of case studies here, or read any of the three below.
FAQ
1. What makes content marketing unique?
Answer: Content marketing focuses on delivering valuable and relevant content to attract and engage audiences, contrasting with traditional marketing's direct sales approach. It builds trust and brand awareness by meeting the audience's needs.
2. Why adopt content marketing?
Answer: It targets audiences with precision, enhances brand trust, boosts organic search visibility, generates leads, and increases sales more cost-effectively than traditional methods, offering a higher return on investment.
3. How does Joomag enhance content marketing efforts?
Answer: Joomag offers an all-in-one platform for creating, distributing, and analyzing engaging content like magazines and newsletters, featuring tools for interactive content, lead generation, SEO, and analytics to achieve marketing goals efficiently.