Properly applied content marketing can quickly become the best tool in a company's marketing toolbox. However, it takes some effort, and sometimes some patience.
Content marketing sees itself as a central part of any corporate communication, and it doesn't matter whether it's a large company, SME, or even a lone wolf. The many different types of content enable everyone to use this tool effectively.
Traditionally, branding is considered the main goal of content marketing, but the campaigns also focus on customer acquisition and retention. Successful content marketing therefore tends to have a long-term strategic focus, although it can of course still be used to generate leads in the short term by raising awareness of products or companies. Accordingly, somewhat more precisely formulated goals can often be set quite simply according to medium-term and long-term effect. For example, increasing the number of visitors to an online store is just as much a medium-term goal as increasing visibility in social networks. In contrast, developing expert status and steadily building a good reputation are classic long-term brand-building measures. Building a community, interacting via the website or social media are among the customer loyalty goals.
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Content can be more than a blog post
One of the positive side effects is that the various types often strengthen the SEO (search engine optimization) of websites. The typical content type is probably the classic blog post, which deals comprehensively with a topic suitable for the company. However, typical content types are also videos, infographics, whitepapers, e-books, podcasts, surveys or webinars. Equally, providing (open source) software can be a valuable part of a content marketing mix, or a computer game. These examples alone show that good content marketing is not something that can simply be done on the side. But even if it has become surprisingly easy today to produce quite acceptable video content yourself, thanks to the smartphone alone, everyone should first critically assess their creative talents themselves. Perhaps, however, there are people among the staff who already work with video production, graphics programs such as Photoshop, or have some other applicable creativity. In the case of sole proprietorships or SMEs, however, not everything will often be available to a sufficient extent and, above all, of sufficient quality. This is where agencies that offer content marketing come into play.
No one can do everything alone
Professional agencies have a whole range of advantages. On the one hand, they have the professionals in the industry in the form of copywriters or designers; on the other hand, they usually use graphics, editing programs, etc., which require a longer training period for the employee of an SME and are also usually anything but cheap. In addition, they often have a network that makes it easier to distribute the content. Agencies have their disadvantage when, for example, a client is a company from a niche industry. Then it can happen that the agency workers first have to familiarize themselves with the area, which becomes increasingly difficult the more subject areas they have to master. And in some cases, even the best briefing cannot hide the fact that the content was not produced by the expert, i.e. the customer himself. Accordingly, the best solution is often a successful mix of internally and externally produced content.
In the end, content marketing must also prove itself
Once the goals and implementation of content marketing have been regulated, the corresponding success control should of course not be missing. Content marketing is perhaps one of those components of online marketing whose success cannot be measured 100 percent with sales figures or website statistics. Whoever wins a new customer because he trusts the company and sees it as an expert, will often not be able to determine in detail after the conversion which blog post or which infographic was responsible for it in the end. Nevertheless, orders won are a criterion that absolutely belongs in the success analysis, if only for purely economic reasons.
Many intermediate goals, on the other hand, are easy to measure. For example, the success of a whitepaper is measured by the number of downloads, as well as the leads it generates and their quality if the prospect had to leave their contact information for the download. Content in social media can be measured by the number of likes, comments or how often it was shared. Posts on the corporate blog are particularly successful if the website statistics show a high number of readers and long dwell times. Or if a call-to-action that may have been set was clicked on.
In conclusion, it can be said that content marketing is no longer a hype that will disappear again in the near future. Especially online, it is becoming more and more apparent that classic advertising, which only aims at sales, is working less and less. Even if classic pop-up banners are now largely a thing of the past in the serious sector, many users find advertising more annoying than helpful. Successful content marketing, on the other hand, starts at exactly the right point, at the problem of a future customer. It leads to being anchored in the customer's memory and builds up a basis of trust in advance. If the solution to the problem then becomes acute, he comes to the company as if by magic. This may be more tedious, more complicated and no longer measurable in detail, but it leads to long-term success.