In today’s world, traditional marketing strategies can sometimes fail to reach an increasingly tech savvy audience. Seemingly infinite choices coupled with the technology to skip and ignore advertising of all stripes, makes it easy for consumers to ignore your message. Basically, we as Internet users create our own media diet based on our taste.
Progressive marketers understand this dilemma and are leading the way with content marketing.
What exactly is content marketing?It’s the modern evolution of a fairly simple concept, a technique for driving sales in our modern information age.
The nuts and bolts work like this: Content is created to serve specific, defined needs of target audiences and made available for free. This content serves customer and business interests in a range of marketing, PR, and sales areas in a fully integrated manner. Once it’s set up, the provider creates access points whereby the customers are eventually led toward a point of purchase.
To put it plainly, content is given out freely, engendering desire toward your brand, eventually driving the customer toward a paid product.
The idea behind content marketing is not new. Companies have been practicing it for ages, offering content itself toward any available marketing or customer oriented role, in a range of mediums before the digital age swept through. The novel twist we see today is how content marketing can and should be integrated within the very core of your customer-centric experience.
The key point to stress is that the content must be consistently valuable and relevant. When all you offer is fluff, the savvy consumer sees right through it. You’ll never attract the type of loyalty or satisfaction you desire with old-school marketing disguised as honest-to-goodness content. With relevant information that’s attractive and valuable to the potential customer, you’ll much more easily drive profitable action.
The idea of crafting and providing a consistent stream of quality content may seem daunting; it’s true that the initial setup will take time and effort in spaces. The payoff, however, is undeniable. Once your content marketing loop is up and running, you’ll acquire a great source of passive income, no longer having to directly trade your time for money. Suddenly, you’re releasing information and products to the wilds of the Internet, setting up avenues for purchase, and watching the payments roll in.
Why does this strategy work so well?
First of all, there are some tangible benefits we can quantify: brand awareness, engagement, customer loyalty, evangelism, and of course, sales themselves are all direct, observable results of content marketing. We see this when looking to highly successful ventures such as Google, HotSpot, and the multicolored galaxy of brands making money hand-over-fist on Facebook. These organizations have seen the light and there’s no turning back.
Providing quality information keeps potential customers returning, witnessing your capabilities, and associating warmly with your brand. This repeat engagement allows you to stay in view of your target audience at every point on the buyer’s cycle.
When consumers have all the choice in the world and a million avenues to find information they seek, the ability to provide valuable, relevant content is what separates brand royalty from forgotten also-rans. You can instill a sense of immediacy and reverence toward your brand and product with the careful deployment of honest-to-goodness content. No one ventures onto the Internet to be distracted by ads and marketing speak. Everyone responds to quality, consistency, and relevancy.
If you can provide a framework of readily available value for your customers, you’ve already taken the biggest step toward leading them to a purchase. Beyond even that, a solid supply of content will ensure that your customers return again and again, up-selling, cross-selling, and sharing your brand with their friends and family. They’ll be happy to share genuinely worthwhile content, and you’ll be happy to see the sales roll in.
With a solid bedrock of content marketing integrated with the core of your business, the passive income possibilities are endless!
