Content Marketing is about providing relevant, valuable, timely information to your customers and prospective customers. Are you delivering valuable content or are you just bombarding inboxes with daily sales messages?

Customers are most likely to buy from brands they trust and organisations with which their loyalty already lies. They will purchase your product and even prefer it over competitors’ options. So, what are you doing to ensure you build that kind of relationship with your target audience? One of the most effective ways is to use content marketing.

The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as;

A marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

What sets content marketing apart from any form of advertising is the word “valuable”. It is all about telling stories which as humans, we have done for ages. The attention of customers will always go to the company that tells great stories.

Content Marketing should be a long-term strategy

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is highly relevant to them on a consistent basis. Unlike one-off advertising, content marketing shows that you actually care about your customers. Now more than ever before, people want to feel like you care about them. The world is louder and noisier than ever before, and attention is the most valuable resource.

When it’s done right, this content conveys expertise and makes it clear that a company values the people to whom it sells. When used consistently, it establishes and nurtures relationships with your prospective and existing customers enhancing your brand. When your audience thinks of your company as a partner interested in their success and a valuable source of advice and guidance, they’re more likely to choose you when it’s time to buy.

Generate high-quality inbound enquires

Content marketing is important because businesses can use it to attract leads and make a case for their product or service when someone is researching what to buy. It provides a competitive advantage. Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies, forty-seven percent of buyers view 3 to 5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales representative, companies that use content marketing see approximately 30% higher growth rates than businesses not using it and Seventy-two percent of business to business (B2B) marketers say content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads they generate. To attain effectiveness, you’ll need to deliver the right content at each stage of the sales cycle.

Essentially, the sales and marketing teams should be unified but this is rarely achieved by most businesses. With content marketing, both departments’ efforts feed into the same funnel, making scalable alignment as easy as ever. For example, the marketing team can leverage insights gleaned from sales calls and customer feedback, while the sales department can complement their prospecting by distributing marketing collateral.

A clear way to look at the benefits of content marketing is to take a step back and analyze what the organization wants to achieve? From there, you can tie your commercial objectives to specific content marketing goals and actions. If your goal is improved lead quality, a targeted lead nurturing campaign would prove invaluable. Similarly, if your goal is thought leadership, investments in social media and organic content creation would be a worthwhile attack strategy.

Running content marketing campaigns empowers you to achieve any objective you need to, without wasting resources on short-term strategies or costly advertising. Investing in high-quality content lets you communicate your message across multiple channels; blogs, Social Media, email campaigns, eBooks, Podcasts and flyers. This multi-channel approach makes full use of the content, provides harmony across all channels, multiple touchpoints and, ultimately, more, better quality engagements.