Writing a blog purely to increase your sales may not bring the best results in today’s time. In fact, the readers lose interest in your content as soon as they realize you are trying to sell something. What may work instead, is educating your potential market with qualitative and unbiased content.
For instance, if you are an IoT solutions provider, you may not generate huge volumes of sales using blog marketing as IoT itself is in a nascent stage and there are limited buyers for it. But you may surely achieve long term leverage by contributing your share in making people aware of the technology and the benefits it can unlock. That means, try not to sell a product but sell an idea.
Here are 5 content marketing strategies that will positively influence your marketing strategy:
1. Give Voice To Your Brand: In an era where consumers are bombarded with huge amount of content through various platforms, the impact of traditional channels of marketing appears to be diluted. Content marketing has the power to strongly connect with the consumers as it is meticulously tailored to their interests and needs. If you are able to give your brand a persona that speaks to their minds, you are more likely to build a positive opinion about your brand, and eventually drive business growth.
2. Address Curiosities: Be genuinely concerned about your customers’ reservations and doubts. Most people who you think are your target customers may not always be fully aware of your products or offerings. Thus, content should be used as an efficient tool to spread awareness rather than pushing customers to buy your product. One of the best examples is Hipmunk: Traveler’s Guide to Tipping. The travel booking site creates excellent content to address travellers’ basic doubts and queries about tripping practices in different countries across the globe. The content is designed to give tourists all the necessary information about restaurants, availability of transport and a lot more. Even though the content is not flashy, it does answer many practical challenges that travellers encounter and bring significant traffic to the website.
3. Exchange Ideas: As a content marketer, you should not only speak but also patiently listen. Your content must be able to enable interactions and permeate debate and discussions. It should raise questions that are deep inside your consumers’ minds but they never realized it.
4. Design a Distribution Plan:Content marketers must plan out how the content is going to be distributed and on which platforms. This would also require proper SEO planning and using important keywords in the content that attracts maximum traffic. The creators may choose from variety of materials such as Blog posts, web content, articles, videos, Webinars, E-books, Whitepapers and more depending on the audience. Also, complimenting the content with videos, infographics, statistics and pictures gives the content an extra edge.
5. Engage on a constant Basis: Parking your brand name in your consumers’ minds is a constant and prolonged effort where patience pays. Content marketing should not be a once in a while medicine but a regular effort to keep your business connected with its audience and addressing consumers’ concerns regularly to establish a personal connect.