What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is sharing any information that is relevant, useful, and interesting to the target audience for the business. The content can be in any form. There are various mediums available to a business to reach out to its target audience.

The content can be in:

• Audio format
• Video format
• Image post
• Blog/Article – or any form in writing.

The main purpose of any content is to provide a useful information to the audience. If it doesn’t provide any value it’s of no use.

what is the importance of Content Marketing for Business

Nowadays almost all business have their online presence on social media platforms or their own website. If you do not have started with the digital marketing for your business check out why it is important to have online presence for small business

What do they post or share on these platforms?

Their product promotions or their service details.

But how long they will be sharing the same content?

Ask a major question mentioned above, do they provide any helpful information to their audience?

Mostly No! So as a businessman what strategies should you implement to grab the attention of your audience? Well, for that you should understand your audience first, understand what they need, what type of content they prefer?

We can broadly categorize this strategy to understand your audience in to 3 parts.

1. Know your Customer

Customer is the center for any businesss, if there are no customers there can not be any business.

Try to identify your set of audience, and know What they want? what are they looking for? What do they like?

You need to understand them before you start providing content. your content must speak what they understand.
What you can do is, create an imaginery avatar of a customer, Your Ideal customer, and you should create the content keeping in mind this character, your customer avatar

2. Identify their Needs

You need to think like a customer, experience their journey of decision making to buy your products. Know what kind of questions that may rise in their mind before buying your product or services. Likewise try to identify more such problems or queries that your customers might have about your product or services or in your niche.

Then create your first piece of content keeping in mind the first sort of query they might have to decide the final purchase of your product. Follow the journey of your customers’ concerns, and create the series of content for them that can make it easy for them to come up to final decision.

3. Provide the Type of content they want

This is the crux of content marketing. You need to identify the type of content. i.e the medium through which your will be presenting the content to them,

Whether it is a video? or an Article? Will they read article?

Or it can be in form of Infographics or Image ?

This may not come to you directly, you need to keep doing an experiment with the content types until you find out the right type.

Consistency is the key.

If you present content consistently to your audience you will observe the gradual growth in your content analytics. I know it is sometimes difficult to provide content consistently but for that, I would suggest having a content calendar.

Content Calendar is a simple tool that helps you to plan out your content. This will help you to plan content well in advance and you can create your content as per schedule, which is manageable.

You can use Google Calender, Hubspot, CoSchedule and other such tool for Content Planning.

Major benefits of Content Marketing for Business

As you are consistent in delivering the best quality content to your audience, Imagine what impact they will have of your BRAND.

Yes, YOUR BRAND, as your content will set some standards and value for your business which is YOUR BRAND.

You might have heard some of the big shot international company names, like Adidas, Nike, Reebok, H&M, Gucci, and many more.

What do they provide? a feel? a Quality product. Right? This same value will create your content for your business. Provided you create Useful content that your customer want.

Following are the Major benefits of being consistent in Content Marketing for Your business:

1. Creates Brand Value.
2. Helps to influence Conversions
3. Improve SEO Efforts
4. helps to generate New Leads
5. Stands out from Competitors
6. Increase Audience attention with great Content
7. Reflects your expertise in the Niche

Content Marketing Platforms

When it comes to content, there are various ways through which you can create content Marketing for business for your audience.
As discussed earlier, You need to identify what kind of content your audience likes. Based on that you can create your content from the following ways:

Social Media

We all know that how social media has changed our lives, and it’s isn’t going anywhere in near future.

You have to establish a strong business presence.

What kind of content you can share on social media?

It can be in form of Images/Videos. Mostly short videos.
As you might have observed that nowadays the video consumption has taken up rise. So why not jump in to it and take the benefit of it?

But you might wonder what video content to present? Well, you can create videos about your products, how it is made, educate your audience about its specifications, process, and importance of its elements. This can create an awareness about your product and services.

Next, you can create your review videos, Testimonials from your past customers. Also you can raise an excitement level with your exclusive products videos.

But keep in mind the Audience’s interest.

Blogging

Blogging is about writing articles about a particular niche.
Blogging is one of the most tested and truly useful ways for content marketing for business.

Most of the business have their websites. But they only have some sort of static information about their products/services.

Each website platform provides the feature to enable blogs. You can use this to enhance your SEO for your website.

What you can write in blogs?

Well, Blog can take up anything. It can include tutorials, reviews, Procedures, Methods to use your product, Product information, or anything related to your niche.

Make sure you don’t overwrite to make your audience feel bored, or in a language, they do not understand.
Keep it simple, avoid industry heavy words that your audience cannot understand.

Tell them your story, your journey right from the beginning, people love hearing good stories. Do you have one?
Go ahead and share your words with your audience, this will have a special connection with your brand

Along with creating meaningful content, SEO also plays an important role in getting traffic to your website. I would recommend building your SEO strategy while you create content for Blogging.

Video Content

Just as blogging you can create video content or vlogging. A vlog is a simple video providing useful information about your business.

Video based content are much in demand and it retains user’s attention for long time if they find it interesting.

You can create videos about your products, your services, your customer experiences, feature products, Solution to common issues that audience face with your products and similar such topics.

You do not have to hire professionals for Video shoots or editing, you can shoot with your mobile. There are many free video editing tools that are easy to learn. Have a hands-on them and you are good to go.

Audio Content

Have you heard a story in audio format? well that can be called PODCAST.

 podcast is a digital audio form of media, Nowadays, people tend to listen to podcasts during their travel, or workout, or any similar activity. This is convenient and easy to use content type.

To know more about the podcasts, I will recommend you to check out article, Understanding the Podcasts.

Conclusion

Content Marketing is all about creating useful, relative, and interesting content for your audience. For any business, big or small content is the king that can drive their audience to the conversions, and help the business to grow.

If you are a businessman, select the best platform where you and your audience can create a relation. Provide them with their needs, engage, interact and transact with the audience in a most effective way.

I hope this article might have provided an insight into content marketing for business, its importance, and its benefits.

Please share your valuable feedback in this topic.

You can follow me on my social media platform @jaisachala.

Want to learn more?

For now, learn about Case Stories, Don’t know what it is? Check it out in the article “Case Stories at its best” by Sayandeep Dey.

If you want to learn this type of content about digital marketing I would definitely recommend you check out the blog of our mentor DigitalDeepak

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Until next time, Take care.