Why Is Content Marketing So Important? Here’s What It Needs To Be.
Content is KING and content marketing is the heart of modern marketing. Rather than bore your customers with ads, inspire them with content.
Coca-Cola’s marketing mission statement is Content 2020, moving from creative excellence to content excellence. #CocaCola’s Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence recently stated that:
“All advertisers need a lot more content so that they can keep the engagement with consumers fresh and relevant, because of the 24/7 connectivity. If you’re going to be successful around the world, you have to have fat and fertile ideas at the core.”
In China, Tencent’s Chairman, Pony Ma answered a reporter’s question about whether China Internet is moving from a traffic war to a content war, saying that:
"In future, the value of Content and IP will become more and more important. The significance of traffic vs content will change from 82 to 55. Traffic is the entrance while Content is the commanding height.”
Nowadays, internet traffic has become more expensive and content is the new strategic battlefield for competition. Internet giants like #Tencent, #Baidu, #Alibaba and #Toutiao have placed their bets on content businesses, competing for users’ fragmentation time. Even for brand owners, investment in content keeps increasing.
For example:
Coca-Cola Journey: magazine-style feature stories brought to life with compelling photography, video and audio. Journey also includes eye-catching infographics and user-generated content.
#FabBeauty: a fashion website created by L'Oreal that shares beauty and hairstyling trends by #KOL and professionals: hairdressers, colorists, barbers, beauticians and manicurists.
Rather than bore your customers with ads, inspire them with content.
As marketers flood their consumers with more and more content, they are beginning to listen less and less. Consumers are so used to being inundated with sales content and they're already tuning it out.
Nearly 60 per cent of #APAC marketers and agencies believed that content marketing is the top priority, as revealed by a global report #NewBase (formerly known as #Publicitas).
What is Content Marketing?
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.
People on the web search for relevant information and high-quality content, and content marketing provides it. Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing content that is entertaining, informative and helpful to potential target customers.
Good content can direct audiences back to your brand website or #Wechat, where you can capture leads and sell products. Successful #contentmarketing creates positive associations to your brand – without the hassle of hard-selling of your products.
Adopt Customer-Centric Strategy for Your Content
When you prepare your content marketing, you should always ask:
Does my content typically convey customers’ concerns? Or do they mostly call attention to the things I intend to sell?
Is my content marketing strategy designed to bring the greatest possible value to my customers?
If products are the only focus in your content, you’re missing opportunities to build customer relationships and, ultimately, revenue. To capture the true value of content marketing, you should deploy different content strategies according to customer lifecycle engagement.
Content Marketing In Practice
What interests your target audience and followers? Only content that is truly relevant to a given target audience can contribute to achieve your marketing goals. Here are five valuable tips that you can incorporate them into your content strategy.
1. Good Content Endures
Similar to fishing, every piece of content you created is like dropping another bait into the water, and higher chance for traffic and conversions. Content marketing has an especially long-lasting effect as high-quality content entices users to continue reading, clicking and exploring. Therefore, everything you publish should provide significant value to audience and maintain high quality consistently, as a result, build your reputation as a source of valuable content to your followers.
2. Personalized Content for Highly-specialized Segments
There’s always a temptation for marketers to write content for a larger audience segments so that they can access potentially higher number of people. However, this approach tends to decrease the relevance and conversion rate of content. Instead, it’s better to focus on one highly specific demographic and establish personalized communications.
3. Invest on Visual Content
We all live in a visual world. The fact that more than 90 percent of content with visuals get more total views than textual content. When it comes to content marketing, we should tell stories through the uses of videos, live streams and compelling images. You should incorporate visual elements in every single post, article, and tweet to catch the most of your audience’s attention.
4. Quality Content Helps Search Rankings
Content is what fuels a brand’s SEO efforts. You need quality content that is not only unique, well-written and relevant to a specific target group, but also search engine optimized with headlines, keywords, useful links and call-to-actions. Quality content helps search engines do their job, attracts links and social shares.
5. Measure Content Marketing ROI
What is your content marketing ROI? The truth is that most marketers don’t know or even not consider it at all. Whatever you do, it is important to measure your efforts and evaluate ROI. You should address these three components of ROI: cost, utilization and performance. Track not only content production costs, but content usage too. Keep costs down and increase cost efficiency for your content creation. Tie your content performance to business objectives and use tools to track performance of social shares, engagement, sales conversions, etc.
The below report provided by #HubSpot lists metrics commonly used for content marketing:
Content is indeed king and content marketing is the heart of marketing in today’s fast-paced digital world. Making a successful content marketing strategy is not easy and won’t happen overnight. It will take you some time to figure out how to improve your strategy so that both you and your customers benefit.
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Further reading
Short Video Douyin Uses POI to Achieve O2O Conversion
Cross-Border E-commerce: Is Your Brand Ready to Enter China?
Enter China Market by a China-accessible WeChat Official Account with Little Cost
How To Get The Best Out Of Your Influencer Marketing
The Age of Attention War in Brand Advertising
Make Your Content Go Viral: Insights from Durex China
Unlock The Buy Button Inside Your Customers’ Brains.
How Startups Use AARRR to Drive Business Growth
Customer Segmentation by Self-Construct
Inattentional Blindness : Do You See Any Brands in the World Cup?