For those of you who are an online business or online marketer, you may already be familiar with the term Content Marketing, which is an online marketing strategy that is carried out through content. Whether it’s content on websites, social media, or business blogs.
Content is an important part of online marketing because through the content we can convey various information or messages about our business to many people.
And just imagine, if you just create a business account on social media without updating content regularly. Of course, it will not produce anything and make consumers not believe in your business, right?
Therefore, do not be surprised if there is the expression “Content is King”.
Table of Contents
- What is Content Marketing?
- Why is Content Marketing Important?
- Important Elements in Content Marketing
- Forms of Content Marketing
What is Content Marketing?
Quoted to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing relevant, important, and consistent content to attract the attention of the audience to convert them into consumers.
Lyfe Marketing also stated that content marketing helps increase the conversion rate of a website by 6 times more than websites that do not use a content marketing strategy.
Not only that, 78% of customers know a business through articles rather than advertisements and 70% of customers trust a business that provides various types of content.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Until now, many large companies have used content marketing as a promotional strategy for their business. Such as Hubspot, RipCurl, Buffer, Rolex, Channel, and many others.
Here are 6 reasons why content marketing is important for your business.
1. Increase Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the ability of consumers to recognize or remember a brand ( brand ), for example through the name, image, logo, or slogan used by a particular brand.
Several ways can be done to increase brand awareness, one of which is through content marketing. Because creating content that is relevant to your business and provides benefits to many people, it means that you give them topics to talk about.
For example, Whello creates digital marketing tips and blog content. When a friend of yours asks how to do digital marketing for their business, you can share the link to the Well blog.
Of course, to learn digital marketing, they don’t just use one article, they will keep coming and reading other interesting articles. The more often they visit and read the Whello blog, the easier it will be for them to remember or recognize Well.
2. Gaining Consumer Trust
As a business owner, you need to build consumer trust in your business. One way is by utilizing content marketing.
This is because before choosing between buying a product, most people do research first. Through content marketing, they will find quality content that you create when you enter your business name in search engines.
Not only that, but by creating quality content, consumers will assume that you are an expert in the business you are running.
3. Increase Website Traffic
Creating interesting and useful content for many people will make them visit your website often. Because on the website, they can get complete information about the products or services you offer.
4. Improve SEO Quality
Content is also one of the important elements in SEO optimization ( Search Engine Optimization ). By creating quality content, it means that you invite many people to come to the website.
That way, Google will assess your website as a website that provides benefits to many people and can be trusted. Your website will be in a good position on the Google search engine.
5. Help Convert Customers
Content marketing will help many people to believe in your business, through that trust will also convert them to buy (use) the products or services you offer.
Important Elements in Content Marketing
When doing content marketing, 2 important elements need to be in it.
A. Relevant, Important, and Consistent
Relevant, important, and consistent are the 3 main requirements that must exist in the content you create.
Relevant here means that the content you create is by the business you run, for example, if your business is engaged in fashion, then you need to create content related to fashion. It also helps increase the credibility of the audience towards your business.
Relevance alone is not enough, you also need to consider whether the content is important (provides benefits) for the audience. That way, the audience will often visit your business website.
The last requirement is consistency, when doing content marketing, you can’t rely on just one piece of content to attract the attention of the audience. So you have to be consistent in updating content.
B. Able to Convert Audience
When creating content, another thing you need to remember is that the content you create is not just to entertain the audience. There is a goal that you must achieve, which is to convert your audience (readers) into customers.
So after reading the content, the content should also be able to make the audience interested in buying the product or service that you sell.
Forms of Content Marketing
The forms of content marketing are quite diverse, here are some forms of content marketing that are commonly used.
1. Blog
A blog is a platform that contains several articles. Through blogs, you can express ideas and complete information. You can create a blog on a business website or through the blogger platform.
2. Videos
Video is one of the interesting content to promote your business. Video will make the audience spend longer time on the website, as well as be a solution for audiences who are lazy to read the content.
3. Email
Email is one form of content marketing because it takes some content when doing email marketing. Good for promotional emails, reminder emails, shopping carts, and newsletters.
The following is an example of the content for email marketing.
4. Social Media
Every type of social media certainly needs content, both content for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other types of social media. That’s why social media is said to be a form of content marketing.
5. Ebooks
And finally, there is an ebook, which is a form of content marketing that is a solution when you need a medium that is longer than blog articles.
When creating an ebook, you can create a download condition, where the audience needs to enter an email first.
It also helps you get leads through ebooks which you can then convert into consumers in the future.
Thus the explanation of content marketing, content marketing is a marketing strategy today that needs to be applied by various business sectors. This strategy not only has high effectiveness to attract consumers but also can last for a long period.