Brands have always been the real influencers of the market and one thing that they love to be known as is a brand that stands out. While being enamoured by the new and interesting ways of creating content, many of the custodians fail to stop and ask whether it’s right for their audience, for their message, or think about the sustainability of the idea. As they end up only focusing on fascinating ideas, what many might miss is the long-term value that can be reaped from the idea.
That’s where content marketing nonchalantly walks into the picture. While content creation in itself might not be a challenge, the art of deriving the right value, improving the reach and attracting new audiences are tasks better done with a proper knowledge of content marketing. While many may think that content marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea, we would like to change this very thought.
Throughout our journey, we’ve learned and identified a lot of methods when it comes to content marketing. From our experience, we’ve selected a list of questions that many of you might have read, heard or even asked yourself in your course of understanding content for your brand! Let’s jump right and answer these questions.
How does content marketing done without directly promoting a product/service help brands create leads and sales?
In reality, your customers are never interested only in your product or service. They are interested to know how you as a brand are solving a problem that is existent. Be it time, resources, cost or even related environmental impact, this problem you solve could be anything but must add value to their life. By addressing the concerns faced by your target audience, you build a bond with them and this is what paves way for your marketing team to ideate better. This helps you to focus on content that is intended to stand out based on elements such as authenticity, problem-solving, expertise and experience in providing simpler solutions. This is what your audience can derive out of your content - A solution. And, this is what helps you in the route of getting more leads.
Why would one want to help their competition by educating their customers?
With many businesses providing monotony and repetition in terms of solutions and offerings, customers today are reaching a point of saturation. Usually, companies lose eyeballs due to lack of loyalty, inability to build long-term relationships and retaining their customer’s attention. But this state can be reset.
By educating your customer you make them aware of the growth in the market and enable them to make informed decisions. This not only helps you create content to disrupt your competitors but also increase value for your content i.e. while helping others you also build a strong base for your brand. As you continue to use this base effectively, it will help you brand yourself as an industry leader in the near future.
What are the social and commercial benefits of interactive content marketing?
The way society consumes content continues to evolve. We can no longer expect users to simply scroll and consume text-heavy content or dull and static content placed in front of them. Neuroscience points to a solution - Interactive content. Interactive content is shown to awaken the brain and results in content memorability and hence a good brand recall value. Therefore, as a brand interactive content is one of the key ways to help your target audience remember your brand for a lot of time. Indeed, interactive content seems to be a very promising way of storytelling in the future!
What’s the difference between audience and traffic?
As a brand your content marketing plan should be focused on creating content that adds value to a particular group of people identified by you. This group of people are called your target audience or audience in general. One of the goals of your content marketing strategy is to get this base of people redirected to a particular asset which you have created, this can be a website, landing page or a lead generation activity. This group who visit your content after redirection are referred to as traffic. Usually this term is used in correlation with a website or landing page where the total number of people visiting is called traffic.
What is a practise in content marketing that we should stop doing?
It’s almost always that the content isn’t focused only on creating a permanent change in how people see a situation, the brand, or the world. Content marketing continues to be additive. Yet, to be truly creative, and offer something different and worthwhile we need to understand that sometimes we need to create content that has no result, i.e. just adds value to the audience and is something you as a brand represent. We must stop focusing on only delivering result-based content, sometimes it’s better to kickback and show a humane side to your brand too.
These questions about content marketing have been asked repeatedly by many, yet remain to be some of the most confusing questions. Content marketing is not everyone’s cup of tea, but learning about it is something that is still possible. For every brand, content plays a vital role and without the right content marketing strategies in place, all the value you wish to add to your target audience is never reaching them in the first place. To ensure that your content not only reaches the right audience, but also helps your brand build its image and value in the market is a goal that can only be achieved by proper content marketing.