Content Marketing Isn’t a Luxury: How to Make Money?
Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves creating and exchanging material online (such as: videos, blogs, and sharing texts on social media), which does not explicitly or directly promote the brand, but aims to provide content that benefits the audience and motivates them to interest in its products or services.
The Content Marketing Institute defines it as: a strategic approach to marketing that focuses on creating and disseminating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and maintain a clearly defined audience, which ultimately drives them to make purchasing decisions. Instead of directly marketing your products or services, you provide useful and relevant content to clients and potential customers, to help them solve their problems. Content marketing is used by major brands such as: P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, John Deere … and many others.
Characteristics of good content marketing
1. Affordable and valuable
Before publishing the content, make sure that it is easy to understand and accessible to your target audience, using terms that suit their scientific or societal level. Content should carry value in customers’ lives, seek to educate them, find solutions to their problems, and change their lives in a better way.
2. It must be shareable
Before creating any content, you should ask yourself whether this content is shareable, will the audience interact with it, if you add a question or poll, will they respond to it? Interaction creates a close relationship between you and your audience, and the more content is accessible to the audience, the more willing the audience will be to interact with it. Also, make sure that it is suitable for your followers to share and share with their friends. Be sure to include the option to “share” on the blog and other platforms.
3. It must be relevant to your products
It is very appropriate that the content you publish is related to what you offer of services or products, because it will help you to show the extent of your experience in your field. For example, if you sell products to mothers, the content you publish should include advice and information about motherhood and childhood. It encourages them to make a decision about the product. The purpose of the content, in the end, is to benefit the audience and make a decision about what you offer it in terms of service or product, and to go beyond consuming the content only by transforming it from visitor to customer.
4. Make your content marketing unique
Although marketers often bring up the same ideas or try to solve the same customer problems, they try to devise other methods that are different from the rest. The content you provide must be unique and distinguish you from the rest of your competitors. Unique content shows the uniqueness of your company, products or services. The content should not be publicly or directly promoting your services or products, remember that the content is specifically designed to benefit the customer and not to sell it directly.
5. Just in time
A lot of marketers use Evergreen Content, but some content is not suitable at a time or in a season and not in another season, you can write an article about the dangers of driving in the snow, and it will be published in the winter season on the days that It is snowing, more logically than the article was published in the summer.
6. It should be of high quality and attract attention
Providing attractive and high-quality content that shows the extent of your interest, experience, and efficiency in the field of work, and increases the confidence of customers and investors in you. One of the most important features of good content is that it can attract the attention of the audience to stop for a long time, especially in the era of the flow of information, images and content of all kinds.
Why is content marketing important?
Effective content helps build relationships, gain customer loyalty and trust, and attract potential clients.
Customer confidence will be converted into reactions (buying decision) and referrals, thus increasing sales and profits.
It saves marketing costs because choosing the least expensive type of content marketing (blogging, for example) and focusing on it will save you a lot of marketing expenses.
Contributes to keeping users more on the site (this is what search engines prefer), and thus your content reaches more visitors and an audience that turns into customers.
It contributes to educating others by disseminating knowledge, information and values widely among the public.
The content builds a good reputation for brands, the more unique and useful the content provided by the brand, the more respectable customers and competitors are gaining.
It promotes your position as a market expert in your field, helping you achieve many of your goals.
Content marketing highlights
Impartial content is the perfect way to build the respect and trust of your audience and build a relationship with them. Customers will get bored if you talk all the time about yourself and your service or product.
By posting high-quality content you will stop seeking your audience because they will come to you to seek advice and knowledge by asking questions on your platforms, or subscribing to your mailing lists.
In order to know what exactly to create, you must know the following:
- The information your customers are looking for
- The problems they face
- The questions they ask
- Their interests
How will you be able to provide content that helps them develop solutions to their problems?
Don’t just provide unique and useful content, but build an audience.
Make sure you have clear goals (avoid spamming content).
It can take up to 9 months maximum. And it takes 15-17 months on average to start reaping the rewards of content marketing.