What is content marketing?
Rather than overtly promoting a brand, content marketers aim to establish their brand as authoritative in their industry.
For the most part, this includes stimulating interest and demand in a product or service by answering real-world questions and solving real-world problems.
Most comprehensive marketing strategies created by ABS Marketing include content marketing via social media and client websites.
What is content marketing?
Needless to say, content marketing is more than posting “stuff” online. This is a strategic activity that aims to generate consistent, measurable ROI in one or many forms:
- Website traffic.
- Engagement.
- Lead generation.
- Sales.
- Customer retention.
In other words, content marketers must motivate targeted audiences to respond to a brand in profitable ways. So, the content that they publish must be relevant and useful.
Why do I need content marketing?
At first, you might not recognize the importance of paying someone to publish useful content that doesn’t directly impact your bottom line. That’s understandable.
However, when you realize that marketing is impossible unless you have fantastic content, you’ll begin to understand. Here are a few examples of how content matters to every marketing campaign.
Social media marketing – If you don’t post entertaining, informative, interactive, and actionable content to social media, you’re not going to attract a loyal following.
Search engine optimization – Google will bury your website in search results if your website doesn’t have fresh, high-quality content. We are
Public relations – Imagine sending a shoddy press release to news outlets that include spelling and grammatical errors and fails to communicate a clear message.
Pay-per-click advertising – In addition to creating high-quality advertisements, you must create landing pages that will engage the people whom you reach.
Email marketing – Your email recipients will ignore your brand if they think that you’re wasting their time. After a while, they won’t bother looking at the contents of your messages.
So, why do you need content marketing? You need it because your entire marketing strategy depends on your content.
What does content marketing accomplish?
Generally, content marketing can achieve one or more of the following goals:
- Increase awareness of your business and brand.
- Generate and nurture leads.
- Convert prospects into customers.
- Support and retain customers.
- Create upsell opportunities.
- Inspire brand advocates.
How do I engage in content marketing?
If you’re like most business owners, you’re not a marketer. So, there’s no surprise that your brand isn’t growing online.
In addition to lacking expertise, you most likely lack time. After all, you fill many roles in your small business:
- Purchasing agent.
- Salesperson.
- Customer service & support.
- Product manager.
- Supervisor.
- Accountant.
- Manager.
Now, add “content marketer” to that list.
There’s nothing easy about owning and operating a small business.
That’s why we’re here.
Content Marketing Services from ABS
We are a digital marketing agency. That’s all we do. We also have economies of scale that make our professional services affordable to businesses of every size.
Although we offer some standard service packages, we also design custom strategies. In other words, we do our best work by designing a marketing strategy that supports your unique business’ mission, values, and goals.
Essentially, we function as your outsourced marketing department.
Analytics
Before going to work, we’ll scour your website’s analytics to get insight into its current contents and performance. We’ll also review your current advertising strategy.
Goal setting
Before we can start designing your content strategy, we need to know who you want to reach. We also need to know what you want to achieve.
Don’t worry. If you don’t have goals in place, we’ll help you set goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive (SMART).
Planning
When you have clear goals, we can generate a custom strategy that includes the tactics that will work best for you. For instance, you can expect us to use your website, blog, and social media to connect your brand to your target market.
Additionally, you can expect us to design an editorial calendar to ensure that your content is consistently published. After all, the timing and placement of your content affect its performance
Content creation
We’ll use every available metric to determine the preference of your ideal customer.
For this reason, we may publish text-based articles for one client and then emphasize video and infographic content for another.
Our goal is to develop an effective content mix for your business.
Assessment
As we publish content on your behalf, we monitor and assess your results. Based on what we learn, we may recommend changes. This step helps us to improve the performance of your content and maximize your ROI.
Take the next step
Now that you understand content marketing basics, you should take the next step.
Contact ABS Marketing today. We’ll help you learn more about how to leverage valuable, relevant content to grow your business.
Meanwhile, if you’re still wondering, “What is content marketing?”, learn 4 Simple Steps to Creating an Effective Content Marketing Strategy at Entrepreneur.com.
