The buzz for 2013 has centered on the need for content marketing to become a critical aspect in your online marketing efforts moving forward. This might be a term you’ve heard but not know precisely just what it means. Content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and publishing fresh content for your visitors. This manifests in various forms, from seemingly simple blog posts, to articles, reports, whitepapers, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, and more. We live in a world that craves information, and the more of it you are able to provide visitors to your sites, the greater authority you will earn in not just their eyes, but also the search engines . They can then reward you with higher rankings, more traffic, links, and sales.
Content marketing is getting more and more popular
According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses anticipate doing an increased level of content marketing. Only 4 percent are not. There are many reasons for this, among them cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize a variety of mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post can be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Re-purposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. Furthermore, this can happen easily and frequently, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite quickly.
A real-world illustration of how content marketing can rock your sales
The New York Times profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, which was watching as their sales plummeted because of the housing recession of 2008. Incoming orders (average $50,000 per order) withered from around six a month to less than two! Their past advertising budget of $250,000 yearly on radio, TV and pay per click advertising had to go. Owner Marcus Sheridan launched an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting primarily of blog posts and videos, and within a relatively short period of time, had not only regained what was lost but beat pre-recessions sales figures.
There’s little doubt that content marketing can provide results, and that it really should have a place in your online marketing strategy for 2013.
