The marketplace is fast evolving and no business wants to be left behind in the race to be the leader. Everyone wants to stay ahead of the curve but how do you do it when traditional marketing is losing significance and conventional marketing methods are being overused? Marketers who stay with the current times have come to realize the potential of content marketing and are effectively using content to generate leads, increase brand awareness and attain thought leadership.
But What Exactly is Content Marketing?
Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them – Doug Kessler
Content marketing is simply creating and sharing content with a targeted audience for the promotion of a product or service. It is a process of curating relevant content and creating reliable and valuable content to generate positive customer action.
Some marketers like to call it an art of communicating to customers without selling. It can be also be described as the pitching of a product or service indirectly, by making the customer more aware and informed and thus generating goodwill and brand loyalty.
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So How To Go About It?
Now that you’re embracing content marketing and using it to convey your brand message, here’s how to do it most effectively. Here are five tools and formats which will be the next big drivers of content.
- Infographics
Infographics are a great way to convey interesting statistics along with impactful messages. No one wants to read dull and boring data or text. They are also loved by social media all around and get reposted due to their appealing visuals. If you embed the link to your website in the infographic, it turns into a brilliant lead generator for you as well. In fact, there are some amazing free tools online for creating infographics, like Visual.ly and Infogr.am. Another great paid tool with an easy to use interface is Piktochart, where you can obviously make your own infographics too!
- Podcasts
Podcasts are slowly gaining more and more popularity due to their easy creation and accessibility. It is a very unique way to market your content, by way of creating audiobooks that can be downloaded by people, or you could create a monthly or weekly series of podcasts. These could include anything from your brand message to the story behind your product or service, all aimed at generating interest among your target customer. Podcasts can be accessed anywhere anytime and that is what makes it a highly effective tool to use. Free tools like Podbean and VozMe make creating podcasts even easier than it already is.
- E-Books
Your business may have a lot of great content individually scattered over social media. To market your content most effectively and pack a punch, e-books are a great tool to do so. Consolidate all your content – all your blogs, articles, tips & tricks – into one PDF and publish it as an e-book which will be easily accessible to any user, so as to make available all information about your product or service along with your brand message at one place. You could take help from a graphic designer or use online design tools like 99Designs to create an irresistible e-book. An e-book stays longer in mind, thus driving home the information you want to share.
- Video
Well, nothing captures the imagination of the customer as well as a video does. Don’t aim for your video to go viral, aim for it to convey the right emotion, to hit the right chord. Videos are also very easy to share, and people love viewing them, even more, when they get any interesting and valuable information or message from them. But make sure a video remains a video and does not become a documentary. Short, crisp and creative videos are your best bet to create thought leadership.
- Presentations & Slideshows
Presentations are not only beneficial for customers but also for business-to-business interactions. Websites like SlideShare are a great tool wherein you can create your own channel and regularly update presentations that you give to other businesses. Moreover, slideshows with images and also some text can be great drivers of content traffic as they are extremely attractive and aim at the customer’s inquisitive intellect.
All in all, content marketing has to start at the conception stage wherein you decide and narrow down what it is that you want to share with your target audience. Then you can move on to curating great content or creating valuable content by using these 5 effective tools and reap the conversion results.
