Content Marketing: Using Quality Content to Increase Sales
Content marketing is an important aspect of marketing, which improves sales and brand awareness by creating content that is useful and highly valuable to the target audience.
Content marketing takes a different approach to marketing than more traditional methods. However, like all marketing, the end-goal is to attract and retain the target customer, as well as to increase overall sales. Whilst traditional marketing tends to focus on selling or pitching a product and/or service to the target market, content marketing shifts the focus to delivering educational, informative, and useful content to that same audience.
By offering the target market genuinely valuable information — offering a solution to their problem or meeting their demands — content marketing is able to help the consumer rather than simply trying to sell them something. Whilst content marketing does focus on creating high-quality content, it is also part of a larger philosophy or approach to marketing, which can be broken down into four main elements.
The first part of this approach focuses on brand positioning — a process that aims to identify and define a clear picture of what the brand is and what its products are.
Value proposition is the second part of the overall marketing plan, which defines the value that the brand offers to its customers as well as identifying its unique selling point. The third part is an analysis of what exactly the brand hopes to achieve with its content marketing strategy, and the fourth and final part is the strategic plan, which includes details of how the business plans to reach its target audience and how it will know if its content marketing strategy is working effectively.
Marketing professionals, such as Chief Creative Officer Ajab Samrai, understand the benefits that content marketing offers. A reduction in marketing costs, higher sales and a better quality of customer are amongst the benefits offered by content marketing, which is all thanks to brands changing their focus from pure sales to the sharing of valuable, interesting and useful content.
Content marketing can be performed on a wide variety of platforms, and there are many methods, techniques and approaches that can be followed. Social media plays an important role in content marketing and is an essential element of a successful content marketing strategy, along with search engine optimisation, inbound marketing, pay-per-click advertising and public relations.
