Is Content Marketing Your Key to Capturing New Customers?
There is one undeniable truth about content marketing: It’s crucial to capturing new customers while retaining loyal buyers. Let’s break it down a little.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a long-term strategy to deliver quality content to your target audience that aims to build trust, boost engagement, and ultimately increase conversions through creative content delivery. By offering unique blog articles and videos on your website, you can boost your search engine ranking by including the usual keywords and phrases new customers use when researching products online.
Whether you encountered content marketing as a strategy back in the early aughts or as recently as the COVID crisis, content marketing is much older than you think. Back in 1918, Jell-O started placing ads with recipes in “Ladies Home Journal,” while the very first example was a John Deer magazine designed for farmers in 1895. And we all remember the catalogs every store sent out before e-commerce took over.
Storytelling and User Experience
As social media platforms and websites become oversaturated with ads (5.3 trillion each year!), consumers have been using ad blockers and new privacy options from Apple and Google to phase them out. Consumers want something real and want to trust the business they give their money to. The best way to create organic engagement while breaking through the monotony of digital ads is through storytelling. Stories are memorable and attention-grabbing, but they also provide a way to showcase the human element behind your brand.
To maximize the impact of your storytelling, provide a stellar user experience. Most customers will gladly pay more for better customer service, while 80% would switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience. Focusing on improved user experience can inspire brand advocates to showcase their positive experience with your brand.
Today’s Content Marketing
There are several different types of content, from written word and infographics to audio and video that can support your marketing strategy. For example, written word content can be blog posts, white papers, email newsletters, and even books. All these forms can improve your search engine ranking through search engine optimization (SEO).
Visual content like infographics, short-form video content, and humorous memes offer a unique way to quickly (and organically) engage with your target audience. Infographics can quickly convey a lot of information by utilizing bullet points and numbers rather than long-form written content. In contrast, short-form video content appeals to society’s short attention spans. Good quality video content is helpful when deciding on a purchase, with 71% of consumers purchase after watching a brand’s videos.
Benefits of Quality Content
Quality content goes beyond SEO and search engine rankings, although those are important. While some may think ads are the way to go with online marketing, 7 out of 10 consumers like learning about brands through article-type content. Consistently posting quality content can create long-term benefits like improving brand image and building trust with your consumer base.
Informative blog posts should answer important questions about your brand and products without coming off as a sales pitch. With 90% of buyers finding custom content useful, it makes sense to prioritize content in your marketing strategy.
Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey
Like different influencers and ads target various audiences, content should also be tailored to the different stages in a buyer’s journey. The first stage, awareness, is when a buyer is experiencing a problem and is looking to solve it. The consideration stage is where they’re putting in the effort to research whether your product or service is the answer to their problem. Finally, the decision stage is where the potential customer settles on their solution.
Creating custom content to cater to each stage in a buyer’s journey can guide new customers through your sales funnel. In the awareness stage, blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks are beneficial, while comparison guides, case studies, and free samples are better suited for the consideration stage. Coupons, consultation offers, and free trials can help drive home conversion in the final decision stage.
Content marketing is key to capturing new customers. If you’d like to explore content marketing strategies for your brand, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help!