When the discussion turns to digital marketing, people often hear about content marketing. For those who still don’t know what this is, content marketing is a method of sharing material about a business through blogs, social media platforms, and videos. Content marketing aims to stimulate the interest of people to a business’ products, advocacy, or services minus the sales talk. Those who have a traditional view of marketing might not like this method because it doesn’t actually try to sell a product or promote a brand.
Unfortunately, those people are losing out on a huge opportunity. Content marketing is one of the most effective methods for driving customers to buy more products from a company. At the same time, it urges customers to promote their brand to others. If you’re interested in hiring a group to help you with digital marketing online in Gaithersburg, you should be open to accepting content marketing.
Brand Awareness
Content marketing is effective because it helps your business build brand awareness without forcing it down people’s throats. People are more likely to love your products if you avoid hard selling. The key here is to pique the interest of people rather than coax them to buy your product.
Take, for example, the company Rip Curl. This company sells anything connected to the surfing lifestyle: surfboards, wetsuits, board shorts, and even waterproof watches. But when they ramped up their content marketing plans, their focus wasn’t on telling people about their products. Instead, they built a blog site where they featured surfers sharing their experiences on surfing. The blog included experienced surfers’ suggestions on which beaches to go to for the best waves. It also included photos of the beach locations that surfers went to.
It was the ultimate guide to living the surfing lifestyle, and people who wanted to know more about surfing flocked to this blog. The more that Rip Curl featured content that wasn’t focused on their products, the more that people became interested in surfing. Even though Rip Curl wasn’t trying to sell readers their products, their revenue increased. People who read their blogs became so interested in surfing that many of them bought most of their equipment from Rip Curl.
Brand Strengthening
Another advantage of content marketing is its ability to build your brand into something that customers will believe to be of great quality. It’s because your content team is producing material that is focused on showing the good qualities of your products without, again, hard selling.
What some content marketing teams do is that they write articles that feature the benefits of your products without mentioning the products themselves. Take, for example, organic cotton clothing companies. These companies produce organic cotton clothes for people who have highly sensitive skin or those who just want extra-comfortable shirts and pants.
When a content marketing team is tasked to produce articles for these companies, they won’t write how comfortable their shirts are. What they will do is to feature articles saying that organic cotton is the most comfortable piece of fabric for people with sensitive skin. Then they might feature certain skin sensitivities or allergies, such as eczema and contact dermatitis, in their articles. This is to inform people suffering from these skin problems that if they don’t want to itch every time they wear a shirt, they should try wearing organic cotton clothes. When they realize that, they might buy some organic cotton clothes from those companies who manufacture them.
Content marketing is an effective marketing method. It may seem like a passive way to promote your brand, and because of that, you might think that your ROI will take longer. But even if content marketing is not as direct as traditional marketing, it is still effective. This is because your customers will become more interested in what you have to say. When that happens, it will be easier to convince them to patronize your brand.
