Content Marketing is a driving force for Search Engine Marketing (SEM). It’s quite common for companies to underestimate the power Content Marketing holds and how it can drive new leads to your business. On average, there are 6 billion online searches a day worldwide with a large portion of those searches being consumer based. With this amount of searches happening per day, a business who doesn’t optimize for SEM miss out on a ton of potential leads!
Content Marketing alone is an important part of any business’ marketing strategy, but a company can’t use just any type of content and call it a day. There’s a ton of different kinds of content that can be used in a marketing strategy. Each content type has a strong point where they can offer an effective ROI for the business depending on the industry. For this article, we will take a look at how blogs, eBooks, case studies, white papers, infographics, and webinars, can benefit your company.
Read More: The Value of Content Marketing: 6 Powerful Statistics
Blogs
Businesses can use blogs for a variety of reasons, such as highlighting the benefits of a new product or announcing the launch of a new service. However, there’s another benefit to your bottom line from blogging: content marketing. Building and contributing to a blog for your business is a powerful content marketing tool for two primary reasons. First, every time you write a new post you are creating one more indexed page for your site. That extra page is another opportunity for your business to show up in search engine results and drive more traffic to your business.
Second, blogs can help you drive engagement through social media as well. Ideally, your blog content is creative material that your followers will want to share on social media. Every time your readers share a blog post you’ve written, it exposes your business to a new audience on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Pinterest.
eBooks
An eBook is exactly what it sounds like: an electronic version of a printed book. The idea behind eBooks is to provide marketable content to your potential customers that is longer than a blog post. eBooks are designed to be viewed on a computer or any handheld device, so your customers can take them on the go. The question now is, why is an eBook powerful in content marketing?
First and foremost, eBooks help establish your brand’s status and position as an industry expert. You want your business to be viewed as an industry leader, and offering a relevant eBook to your followers establishes an online reputation for your brand. An eBook goes into greater detail than a blog post or article, can generate revenue once you have expert status as customers will pay a little money to buy your book, and it is produced with greater speed and efficiency. Rather than several weeks for printed books, an eBook can be churned out in a matter of weeks.
Case Studies
Case studies are valuable in content marketing for the same reason you might read Yelp or Google reviews before trying a new restaurant. You want to know the food is good and the service is exceptional, right? Online shoppers spend a lot of time researching and reading reviews before making purchasing decisions, and you can provide them with first-hand research by producing and promoting your own case studies.
One of the most common forms of a case study is found on business websites under the label “success stories.” In most cases, these stories highlight the challenges a customer was facing, and how that brand’s product/service helped meet that challenge so the customer could overcome the issue in question. Case studies give you a chance to highlight a product or service and show customers how it helped someone else in their same position.
White Papers
A white paper is a sly form of content marketing. The text within a white paper is rich and substantive content meant to educate customers, not promote or sell directly. White papers can be used to present new ideas that are prompt and provoke innovating thinking. A white paper should promote a clear idea backed with solid data. You can best think of a white paper as the backbone of your content marketing. It can be used as a road map to engage and communicate the unique value your product/service brings to customers.
Infographics
You see them everywhere today. Infographics combined colorful graphic design with valuable content and rich data to present your product/service and brand to customers in an easy-to-digest format. Infographics allow you to present complex information that might be dry and boring in a captivating graphic instead. Infographics have grown in popularity in content marketing for several reasons:
-
The graphics grab the viewer’s attention quickly
-
Data demonstrates expertise
-
Complicated information is made more understandable
-
Boosts brand value by demonstrating product/service value in a meaningful way
-
Helps your content go viral. Good infographics are often widely shared on social media
Webinars
Webinars make it easier for your company to host conferences in real time without travel, hotel, and lodging costs. Whether done through multicast video conferencing or audio conferencing, webinars give your business the chance to interact with clients and customers in real time while promoting a product or service. Webinars deliver a great deal of value to your content marketing, from allowing you to promote new products and increase brand awareness. Hosting webinars establishes brand credibility within your industry and can help you build a bigger contact list within your industry as well.
Pay Per Call & Content Marketing
Different marketing tactics have their places within a business, and using Content Marketing in Pay Per Call can have big benefits if used in a proper way. The secret behind Content Marketing for Pay Per Call is to make it adaptable to the mobile world. The majority of consumers who search for businesses do so on their mobile device. If you optimize your content for mobile devices, your content will start to drive more leads. Optimizing for mobile is key for Pay Per Call.
Creating content that caters directly to their an audience’s needs will help market your service. To help readers interested in your content, create an opt-in email option to stay up-to-date with your business. If you make content your audience is interested in, email leads can start flowing in.
Content Marketing can also be used as a promotional strategy. People on average spend 2 hours a day on social media, and as a marketer if you can stay on your audience’s mind during these 2 hours, these leads can start to convert, Social Media is great for promoting your content. It helps drive readership to your posts and once a reader is on your site, it’s likely they will stay to look around. Website traffic is important in any industry.
The moral of the story is that despite the usual consensus, Pay Per Call and Content Marketing can boost your mobile conversions in the stratosphere. The average consumer depends on their mobile devices at an increasing degree allowing Content Marketers to hold an extremely bright future.
Read More: How to Optimize Content For Mobile Marketing