Ever since digital marketing came into play, businesses are being more creative, automated and precise in their chase of their targeted audience. There are various digital tools and techniques which one can make use of to grow its business using the digital means.

One of those techniques or form of digital marketing services is, Content Marketing. As business owners you might not be very familiar or know the exact meaning behind content marketing. So let’s breakdown this word first;

Content Marketing is simply a technique or approach used in the marketing world to attract and target a precisely described audience through creating and distributing content regularly to achieve your business goals.

That being said, let’s look into why content marketing is one of the best options to market your business and scale its potential reach.

Why Content Marketing is the Best Option?

• Way better ROI

Every marketing effort is directed towards just one goal, that is making money which could be direct (promoting your product/service) or indirect (brand awareness). However either in long term or short term the brand wants more leads, customers or clients.

Talking about the overall ROI, according to Content marketing institute, it’s evident that content marketing costs around 62% less than traditional or outbound marketing. Also in many other studies, it has been proven that inbound (content) marketing brings way more return on investment compared to outbound.

It’s important to mention that the primary reason and logic behind this better ROI is the general nature of how inbound and outbound marketing are differentiated. With inbound the customers are bound to come to you, however in outbound it’s you who is to be knocking on their doors.

• Builds Trust in Your Audience

Trust is the variable of success for anyone selling anything in the world. If your targeted audience doesn’t believe in what you are selling, as much as you do, then you’ll never be able to scale your business. You may be able to sell your product once or twice, or have a couple of clients for your service, but with trust you can have regularly buying loyal customers/clients.

What content marketing does is providing information or knowledge over a subject that is relevant to your business and solves problem for your targeted business.

For example, a cleaning company writing an article on “An Office Cleaning Checklist” also shows the checklist the company follows which indirectly mentions how good and detailed their process is. The consumer reading the article would start believing in their service’s quality.

• Scalable Yet Targeted Reach

Growth and scaling is the dream of every business. Let it be a tech company, an agency or even a brick and mortar store, the hunger for growth usually never stops. Content Marketing is known to for its incredible ability of scaling it’ reach.

Let’s take search engines for example, which are one prominent medium of doing content marketing. You create a piece of content which solves one or several problems for your consumers.

Again taking the previous example, let’s you’re a cleaning company, and you write an article on “How to Clean Your Office?” for your consumers. The interesting part is that this one phrase (How to Clean Your Office) isn’t just a random phrase. It’s being searched in search engines like Google hundreds and thousands of times all over the world.

Thus if your readers after reading that article contacts you for reading services, that won’t be just one person. They’d be hundreds of people depending on how much traffic your website was getting yet you just wrote one article. That’s how one piece of content can help you scale.

Using Content Marketing for Scaling Business’s Reach

Many of the marketers or business owners when think about content marketing, only have one or two channels in mind. However, content marketing itself is a very broad term which has many components.

• Search Engine Optimization

SEO is definitely the first in list when we talk about a content marketing channel. Search engines like Google are one of the biggest traffic sources for websites today. In fact in 2019 Google contributed about 75% of all desktop web traffic.

Top-notch SEO services when gets mixed with content marketing can accomplish wonders.

But how does it work?

Let’s say you started a new co-working space business and want it to be promoted through content marketing using search engine as a channel. Find some relevant keywords with good search volume you can see the demand you can fulfill with content creation.

For example, you can write an article targeting the keyword; “Choosing a Co-working Space” by writing an article on the topic; “How to Choose a Co-Working Space for Your Business?”

This piece of content is bringing traffic to your website out of which a small percentage of visitors will potentially convert into customers, provided that you consistently keep the content cycle rolling.

• Social Media Marketing

Social media is the highest engagement channel for promoting any marketing campaign. Having nearly billion users, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter and LinkedIn have their own dynamics can get your content in front of your targeted audience.

As of January 2020, the total active users on all social media platforms are around 3.8 billion. The number itself is huge and directly implies that your target audience is present on any of these platforms.

When we talk about creating content and distribution, the concept remains the same. You have to solve problems for your consumers with your content on social media and when it’s done on a larger scale you start acquiring more customers.

When we talk about content marketing through social media, what else can you do than just posting pictures with good captions and using trending hashtags?

You can target your potential customers based on demographics, interests, activities and behaviors precisely. Using the previous same example, let’s say your coworking space needs to be promoted through social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram.

You can create a video of 1 minutes showing what factors should be taken into account when choosing a Coworking space with the intention of running it on paid advertising targeting the audience relevant to your business.

You can then create another ad-set which retargets the users who consumed that video up to at least 30 seconds introducing them to your coworking space. Afterwards a third ad-set can target the users which had shown the most engagement with the second video and present your coworking space’s prices and packages.

That is how a content marketing funnel can help you narrow down from a broader audience to your precisely selected customer.

A challenge most of the social media marketers face is differentiating between each social media platform and then shaping their content with respect to that.

So what does that mean?

Let’s say you have a sneakers brand which you want to promote on social media. Platforms like Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok would be the best choice.

But would you choose the same platform if you’re looking for some B2B prospects/leads? The answer is no. In this case LinkedIn would be a better place to market on.

The reason for this is that most of the users on Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are teenagers while most of those on LinkedIn are business owners or professionals. Each platform has different audiences which by simple human psychology consume different kind of content.

• Email as a Distribution Channel

One aspect of content marketing apart from creating content is distribution. You can create the most useful and the most researched piece of content, but if you’re distribution channels aren’t helping you put that content in front of the right audience, it’s all wasted.

As your website start getting some traffic through the content marketing efforts of SEO & Social media efforts, you should start making your email list. An email list can be used for your newsletter where you can commit to regular content for your audience.

What’s good about email newsletters is that it comes right into your inbox. Your consumer wouldn’t even need to perform a search and look through the results. If that’s what he was already looking for, he’ll open up the email and consume that content right away.

Email can also be used to amplify the reach of the content pieces you’ve been creating.

Secondly, email is also known to be a better medium for conversions. In fact, according to Oberlo, every 1$ spent on email marketing turns into a return of 42$. Thus the ROI is insanely great through emails.

Conclusion

Content marketing have existed long before internet has existed and if you understand the basic concepts of it, your campaign will always be a good performer.

However one thing to point out here is that there’s not one best channel you can use for content marketing.

It totally depends on the industry your business operates in and the goals you’re trying to accomplish with it.