Each and every day society engages with marketing tactics like posters, advertisements and product placement but content marketing is what sets businesses a part.

Content marketing is defined as: “a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Providing value from your content marketing to your target audience is the overarching goal.

It’s critical for business success to focus on making better content (not just anything) and providing the type of content your audience actually wants.

When an individual feels as though they have gained value from your content, it is likely they’ll be in a state of mind to ‘return the favour’, which for business ideally means, make a purchase.

In fact, market research firm, FocusVision, found B2B buyers (business to business) consume an average of 13 content pieces before deciding on a vendor. Note: Content pieces include blogs, video posts, testimonials and social media.

If we take a look at the buying cycle, awareness is first, then research, consideration and purchase, so content marketing is as crucial as ever before.

In a world with an overload of information and readily accessible material at our fingertips, a helping hand in the first and second stage of the buying cycle never goes astray.

Essentially, potential clients/customers find your content, find value in it and by the time they are ready to consider your product/service they are already convinced they want to work with you or purchase from you.

The secret to great content marketing, as discussed, is to add value.

If you’re struggling to figure out what would be ‘valuable’ you can ask your existing customers or clients what kind of content they would find helpful and what would have been helpful to them when they were looking for your product or service.

Some types of content marketing techniques include:

  • Infographics
  • Podcasts
  • E-books
  • Blogs
  • How-to guides
  • Apps

A prime example of successful content marketing is Coca-Cola.

Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ campaign took the 150 most popular names in Australia and added them to the side of bottles and people went crazy for it.

Why was this so successful?

Personalisation. This forms the crux of content marketing. Coca-Cola was able to target the thing most important to their customers, their name, thus adding VALUE to their bottles.

The brand gained attention by using names and revolutionising emotional connections by asking customers to share their product, literally with the person whose name is on the bottle, but figuratively through social media which took the campaign viral.

As you can see, content marketing is critical for business success in the modern world.

Stand out from the rest and create great content marketing. If you would like to discuss social media management, Web Bird Digital is here to help.