What comes to mind when you hear the words ‘content marketing’? I bet that you may think about blogs and different social media platforms. However, content marketing is all about compelling storytelling, and it has been around long before the internet.

The human mind has always been able to connect to relatable stories, and it has served as a great way to gain attention. It is true that content is king, and to get the best results from content marketing; you need to understand what it is and how to go about it.

In this article, we will understand what content marketing is and how you can get results from it. We will also look at some critical statistics about content marketing.

Content marketing 101

According to the Content management institute;

“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."

Traditional marketing techniques often involve specific product-marketing efforts. These efforts deployed to get customers interested in the product/service and the value that you offer. The difference between traditional marketing and content marketing is that the latter focuses on the customer.

Today, marketing is all about providing the customer with the kind of value that they can’t get anywhere else. This works better than one-off product marketing as it helps customers to gain knowledge and answer crucial questions. Content marketing includes things like informative articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, webinars, and many more.

Target audience

One crucial detail about content marketing is the fact that there is a target audience. This is why it is essential to carry out market research to find out the necessary information about your audience. During the process of planning or producing content, you need to ensure that you create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona refers to the aggregation of critical details about your target audience. It includes things like their age, gender, marital status, interests, and location, to name a few. This is helpful because it helps you understand the people that your content is made for, and it helps you to build a lasting relationship. When you know the people that are viewing your content then you can create specific kinds of content.

For example, at Vdeesign, we understand that our audiences have certain distinct features. This understanding has helped us to regularly create content that you love. When you know the personality traits of your audience, then you can identify the kind of answers that they seek. This is a great way to build trust and subsequently improve conversions.

Another essential factor with content marketing is consistency. You need to ensure that you provide valuable content to your audiences regularly.

Content marketing is coordinated, and the goal is to create meaningful relationships and subsequently leverage these relationships. Today, customers want to feel like your company cares for them. By creating relevant and relatable content, you can provide value and inspire them to respond in specific ways.

The world is a pretty noisy place, and several things call for the attention of your readers. You need to consistently provide content that will help you to become a credible and authoritative source of information. By positioning your brand as an authority, you can improve the trust that customers have for your brand.

Customers have short attention spans; therefore, customer attention has become a scarce resource. This is why you need to maximize every opportunity that you have to communicate with your target audience. By doing this, you can earn the loyalty and trust and subsequently strengthen relationships.

10 fast facts about content marketing

Men lie, Women lie, but numbers never lie.

In this part of the article, we will consider some statistics about content marketing and what it means for you.

1. 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each day (source: eMarketer). This shows you the importance of consistency when it comes to content marketing. Your competitors are likely going to remain consistent, so do you!

2. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads (source: DemandMetric). This does to show you that content marketing is a significant investment that provides fantastic results. You do not have to run a hole through your pockets to reap the benefits of content marketing.

3. 93% of B2B marketers use content marketing (Source, CMI). This shows that you need content marketing to gain the attention of potential customers. With content marketing, you can build trust over time and keep prospects engaged.

4. 60% of the most effective BC2 marketers have a documented content strategy (source: CMI). You must have a documented content strategy because it helps you to create a direction for marketing. It is easier to produce engaging content when you have a content strategy.

5. 69% of marketers say that content is superior to direct mail and PR (Custom content council). Although direct mails and PR are crucial, they don’t come close to content marketing. With the creation of useful content, marketers are more likely to appeal to their ideal customers.

6. 72% of marketers are producing significantly more content than they did a year ago (CMI). This goes to show you that content creation has become a critical part of competition amongst marketers. This increase is due to the customers’ demand for quality content.

7. The most common content marketing delivery mechanism is social media, used by 87% of marketers (Source: CMI). Creating content is one step; you need to ensure that you deliver them to the right place.

8. The demand for infographics has increased by 800% in the past year (Source Unbounce). Infographics have become more prevalent in recent times as customers tend to prefer visual representation of data.

9. 91% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content (source: TopRankBlog). Linkedin is going through a growth rate, similar to what happened with Facebook in 2012.

10. 73% of B2B marketers use YouTube to distribute content (TopRankBlog). After Google, YouTube is the largest platform, with more than 6 billion hours of video views every month.

Rounding up…

The relevance of traditional marketing has waned in recent times. Today, forward-thinking marketers understand that content marketing is a better way. It is easier to communicate with an audience that you continuously educate, inform, or entertain.

When content marketing is done correctly, it influences customer behavior after they consume your content. The kind of content that you decide to use depends on your audience (we will look at the various types of content and their effects in subsequent articles)

Thank you for reading,

Cheers!