Content marketing is becoming more and more important for businesses with every Google update. The former head of the web spam team of Google, Matt Cutts, revealed that Google implements over 500 algorithm changes per year; that comes to around 2 changes per day. This shows how Google is intended on showing only high-qualified sites which have quality content. Keeping this in mind, businesses are creating more content than they did two years ago. According to the statistics provided in HubSpot, There are 31% more bloggers today than there were three years ago and 46% of people read blogs more than once a day.
Content marketing has become an effective means for organisations and businesses to advertise their products, improve their brand recognition and communicate with their customers. It would be true to say that if any business is neglecting content marketing then it is losing a great amount of money. According to a survey done by WP Curve, 89% of startups are using content marketing. The same survey also shows that 70% of the startups are happy with content marketing.
As mentioned by Smart Insights, content marketing is going to be the most commercially important part of digital marketing in 2015 (see the graph below). Most of the inbound links are coming from content marketing and this no secret.
So if you are thinking that if you do not have the resources or the time for content marketing, the following 5 points will change your mind about it.
- Content marketing needs lesser resource and time than you thought
Most of the times businesses would shy away from making content marketing as an integral part of their marketing strategy due to the fear of wasting resources and time. But if you are going to market yourself, you have to choose an option to advertise your product or service. As a startup it is quite probable that people have not even heard your company name, let alone your product or service. Press Release and traditional methods are costly and people may not even bother about it.
You are not one of the big organisations but a startup who have received a good amount of funding which needs to be utilised properly. So it is better to go for content marketing and you may surprised that it requires very less amount of resources when compared to other types of digital marketing. You can start a blog with your in-house team or publish guest links to good sites.
A good example is Unbounce. It has generated more than 23 million leads and built a base of over 6000 customers. The blog has 140,000 unique visitors per month. Content marketing has always been a top priority and the co-founder, Oli Gardner, himself blogged at least once a day to ensure that the content was of high quality and credible.
- Get to showcase your expertise in the field
If you know it you should flaunt it. Become an industry knowledge leader by regularly creating informative, unique and innovative posts based upon your industry. If you are afraid of giving away too much information, then it is time you stopped worrying. It has been well-established that people hire professionals because they are not good at doing the same thing as well as the professionals. So there is no such thing as giving away too much information.
I have read one survey on B2B leads generation that more than 40% of B2B customers first of all read about the company and their services or products online before making a deal. And after reading about their work, 50% of these companies complete a deal immediately. So, it is of great importance that you showcase your expertise and knowledge in the field along with any examples you might have.
- Grow better with content marketing
With content marketing you can be very active with the community base you may have in social media network and blogs. As a startup, you may have a limited reach in the start. But this should not be a hindrance but a positive thing for you to actively associate with your customer base and provide useful resources and information. In the survey done by WP Curve, it has been revealed that 66% of startups have reported that content marketing was important in driving growth for their business.
If you are innovative startup with unique ideas, you can start a new type of community on your own. This will help to establish a niche engagement place, where you can conceptualise new thoughts about the industry and create a group of trusted followers.
- Make your brand image a trustworthy one
The best thing about good content marketing is that you can add value to your brand and make an image that is trustworthy to your customers. Through content marketing you can increase your brand reputation by showing that you really know what you are doing and the trust that you will earn will be a great asset for the future. Trust is something that greatly helps in the most effective form of marketing - word-of-mouth. People who read your content and find it highly useful and informative will share with their own community and this will in turn help you to increase your brand visibility.
There is a nice quote by Josh Clark (inspired by Bruce Lee), "Content is like Water. You put water into a cup it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot." You put good content online; the content becomes the brand image.
- Helps to bring in more traffic to your site
As mentioned earlier, Goole loves high-quality, unique and insightful content. So it is simple that if you have a great content marketing strategy based upon quality content, then naturally your website will have better rankings. So, the motive is clear. To get successful results from SEO, you have to have quality content that is engaging and is resourceful for visitors to read and share. Not only that, you also need to produce good content regularly. It is evident that most of the inbound leads come from direct organic result searches.
Get ready to start-up your content marketing plans
So from the above pointers one can see that content marketing is a promising thing for startups to grow and improve their brand recognition. Content marketing is a driving force of today's digital marketing campaigns and if you could use it effectively you can see your startup reap huge benefits from it.
Contributed by http://www.naukri.com/
