“Content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less,” is a much-quoted statistic from Demand Metric.
But does content marketing really work? And, if so, how long does it take to work?
In this content marketing FAQ, the Loomly Team unearths the answers to all your questions — and more.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable and relevant content to engage, inform, entertain or grow a brand’s following.
Content marketing is a type of inbound marketing that tries to attract, engage, entertain, and inform a target audience rather than directly promoting a brand’s product or services.
You can use content marketing to:
Content marketing uses a diverse range of content mediums to connect with an audience, including:
The CMI defines it as:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content writing is the execution of a content marketing idea by creating content for web pages, blogs, social media, and other marketing mediums. Content marketing, on the other hand, is a strategy on how to use content to achieve the desired outcome.
There are four main goals of content marketing that really matter to brands.
Building a list of subscribers permits you to communicate with them regularly. And that allows you to market to them with valuable and relevant content.
Great content can encourage prospects to sign up for a demo, register for an event, or request access to a resource center. Unlike subscribers, leads provide more than an email address. A lead could be defined as a contact in some organizations because they share more information about themselves than subscribers do.
Content marketing typically involves creating pieces that offer proof points to help customers decide (or justify) choosing your product or service. For example, testimonials and case studies provide examples of how you have helped others.
Though many think of content marketing as a top-of-the-funnel play, content can also reinforce the customer’s decision after the sale. Customer marketing content can help make sure the customer gets value from the purchase – and is likely to buy again.
Here are eight examples of content marketing you can learn from:
There are five key elements all of these campaigns share:
Content marketing works by offering readers informative and useful material that provides insight and value. Using blogs, ebooks, social media posts, graphics, and videos, content marketing attracts potential customers, keeps them engaged, and moves them further along the sales funnel.
Content marketing drives traffic to your site, helps establish you as a leading voice in your industry, and gives audiences useful, actionable content that they need to solve their problems.
But content marketing also:
Consumers are attracted to authenticity, transparency, and friendliness in a brand. As such, marketers have discovered that they need to approach the consumer differently. Instead of serving up the same old ads, they must add value to consumers’ lives. Hence, the fundamentals behind content marketing – relationship-building, focusing on the customer versus the brand – were born in response.
These nine stats prove that content marketing really does work:
Bottom line: Skilled, consistent content marketing works.
While the actual amount of time will depend on your business and circumstances, for a small to medium-sized business, a strong content marketing strategy generally takes between six and nine months to yield real results.
Here are nine ways to make your content marketing more effective:
Here are the five best content marketing methods you should be using:
Whatever kind of content marketing methods you adopt, you should always start with the foundation of quality content.
As of July 2020, the top 10 content types used by B2C marketers in the previous 12 months were:
Check out this list of 95 creative content marketing ideas.
Yes. To be more specific, content marketing relies on a set of skills.
SEJ lists the Top 10 content marketing skills to learn for greater brand success:
Here are seven ways you can build the skills you need to kickstart your content marketing career:
A content marketer needs to be both a storyteller and a data analyst. Ultimately, your goal as a content marketer is to work as a part of the company’s overall digital marketing strategy by identifying and engaging with the target audience in a way that is meaningful to them.
Take a look below at the day-to-day responsibilities of a content marketer:
Here are the best content marketing tools:
When asked about the role of content marketing, Seth Godin famously answered: “Content marketing is all the marketing that’s left.”
That was several years ago, yet it still rings true today.
In fact, the global content marketing industry will be worth $412 billion by 2021.
Make sure content marketing is front and center of your strategy.