The Importance Of Content Marketing
Content marketing has evolved a lot over the past few years. While quality content has always been a hallmark of successful online marketing, the way people use quality content has changed.
Plenty of businesses and individuals have relied on content as a go-to marketing tool for years. And, for a long time, text-based content remained king. Most online marketing funnels, such as blog posts and link building, relied on text-based content to network and, eventually build an audience.
The evolution of technology has changed all of that. A decade ago, people didn’t have access to other forms of content, such as videos and images. Most people had dial-up Internet access, so it was difficult to access that type of content on a regular basis.
Today, most people use faster Internet connections that have evolved with the times. Video and image-based content are the norm now, and with most people watching or viewing some type of image-based content nowadays, businesses need to adapt and start marketing with that form of content, too.
2016 was a revelation for many businesses in that respect. And, there’s a reason behind that. In this article, let’s learn about why content marketing’s so important nowadays.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing is a necessity for businesses if they want to have a successful online marketing campaign. It even helps businesses convert prospects into leads far faster than other marketing methods have in the past and it will help your Google ranking. Here are a few other reasons why that’s the case.
Content: more than text
Content, in the early days of the web, mainly referred to text-based content like articles, blog posts and web copy. Nowadays, content is more than just text. You can lots of interactive elements and of video which is the most engaging of all.
Include text, images, audio and video . And, they’re not just useful separately, either. People now combine all four elements to create multimedia content for their audiences to view and consume.
If you write some great content, you can also re-purpose it by turing it into a slideshow and posting it on slideshare, make a video with it and post it on YouTube, Vimeo and lots of other video sites. Turn it into a PDF and post it on document sharing sites like Scribd. Maybe use it to capture leads by making it downloadable after users give you their email.
Now that technology has evolved to allow people access to information at any time, so has content.
Studies have show that longer content is gets better results. Articles with over 2,000 words get shared a lot more that shorter articles of only 500 words. The most obvious reason being that longer articles provide more value because they can get into a lot more detail.
Don’t forget about mobile, too
Mobile platforms exploded over the course of this decade—and it’s only going to go up from here.
More people access content from their mobile devices nowadays. In fact, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are some people’s only form of web access. With the aforementioned fast becoming a reality, it’s imperative for businesses to get on board with promoting their goods and services via mobile platforms.
Of course, it’s an even better idea to start developing content befitting a mobile device. That means utilizing responsive web design. Responsive web design is a type of practice used to create websites and web pages that fit any device where people view that website or web page.
Responsive web design displays content properly, and in ways attractive enough for people to, well, want more out of that content. There’s a reason why many businesses want their websites and web pages to be responsible. Not only does it look attractive, but it’s the best practice, too.
Your content, your story
Another thing about content marketing in this decade is the phenomenon of telling your story to your audience.
Creating content that reaches out to your followers is one of the elements of having a successful content marketing campaign. Don’t believe that?
When people are encouraged to act after reading content, they’re acting because something within that content encouraged them to act. In most cases, the content appealed to them enough. It spoke to them.
You can speak directly to your audience if you create content that engages. That content can be as simple as a blog post to as intricate as a series of video advertisements geared toward showing others your work process.
People want to relate to the brands they love to buy. They also want their favorite brands to be transparent. By staying transparent, relatable and honest with your audience, you’ll gain the potential to grow that audience in the future.
Promote your old and new content
Of course, you can’t really create content that’ll languish in the depths of the web. You have to, eventually, promoting your older content alongside your new content, too.
There’s always an audience for something on the web. And, your content isn’t going anywhere, either. Content from the mid to late 1990s still exists on the web somewhere, so it’s not like your content will disappear in the next decade.
Even if the information is outdated, it doesn’t hurt to update that content. That way, you’ll have twice as much content to promote when you do decide to finally update.
As you can see, content marketing is a vital part of promoting and building a business via the web. Content marketing is so effective that it actually helps small businesses save money on online marketing. So, that alone makes content marketing worth trying at least once.