My Numbers Are Fine – Do I Need to Invest in Content Marketing?

Your business is only as good as its content marketing strategy. Exaggeration? Not when a survey like Smart Insight's How Effective is Content Marketing in 2016? exists. Content marketing is rated as the most important marketing technique in terms of generating leads and sales. It takes precedence over big data, conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization, and mobile marketing.

Content marketing is more effective than the bottom seven factors combined when it comes to commercial impact. It has the power to generate organic brand awareness, increase site traffic, and boost profitability. If you aren't maximizing your investment in content marketing, you're doing your company a serious disservice. Regardless of what industry you're in, what product you sell, or what service you provide, content marketing is the key to connecting your brand with consumers in 2016.

Content Marketing and Brand Strategy Today

Modern consumers are constantly bombarded with pop-up advertisements, noisy notifications and commercial messages on their connected devices. Advertisers have gone overboard capitalizing on the trend toward technology, using it exhaustively to market their brands. The key to engaging with modern consumers isn't to grab their attention with an interruptive advertisement, but to resonate powerfully with carefully tailored content.

Convey your brand's message without being blatantly promotional to build trust and seal conversions. Tailored content is arguably the most important part of your marketing strategy. Content marketing drives the sales needle by building relationships and optimizing communication with your consumer. The impact and return on investment (ROI) of solid content marketing is immense - if you know how to maximize your chances of success.

Why Content Marketing?

Content marketing is at the top of the charts for enhancing a brand's commercial impact, but what does this really mean? The benefits of adding or improving your brand's content marketing strategy are numerous, boosting your brand's recognition and placing your company in the limelight. Your content should focus on engaging with your consumers, fostering brand loyalty and cultivating lifelong customers. If you successfully work this angle, your content will do the work for you.

If you publish your content in many places on and off the web, you generate greater brand visibility, inbound traffic, customer engagement, word-of-mouth advertising and new customer acquisition. Any one of these has the potential to pay for the time and money you've spent on your strategy. Content marketing offers compounding returns, enhancing your reputation and overall value for long-lasting returns. Content marketing has a high ROI. It's that simple.

When you invest in content marketing, you gain an edge over the competition. Odds are that your closest competitors have already invested in their content marketing strategies, capitalizing on opportunities you're missing. The sooner you invest in content marketing, the better your chances are of staying on top of evolving trends and capturing consumer attention. The more time you spend on content marketing, the better your competitive advantage and ROI will be.

 

Questions to Ask About Your Marketing Strategy

Content marketing isn't a trend. It's a staple for every successful business. Good content marketing can catapult a brand into the spotlight for all the right reasons. If you're unsure of whether or not you need to invest more into your content marketing strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• Is my content strategy building my brand and furthering its goals?


• Does my content directly address my audience's needs and interests?


• Does my content convey my brand's personality?


• Is my audience engaging with my current content?


• Is my brand gaining an edge over my competition?


• Do I fully understand the point of content marketing?

If you answered no to any of these questions, it's time to reevaluate your current content marketing investment. You must have a clear idea of what your business's objectives are: driving conversions, generating leads, increasing your social recognition or other goals. Then, you must tailor your content marketing strategy to meet these goals. Above all, successful content marketing depends on research. You must understand your target audience in-depth and publish content that generates responses.

What Does Good Content Marketing Look Like?

Good content marketing focuses on the consumer, not the company. To enjoy the significant returns content marketing has to offer, you must focus on what your content can do for your consumers - not what consumers can do for your brand. Today's best content marketing strategies are creative, visual and personalized. Forbes lays out six tips for successful content marketing, which include developing an audience persona, tracking user engagement, and incorporating the user experience. It's clear that the best content marketing strategies in 2016 place the consumer first and foremost.

Every business should invest in content marketing as part of their overall brand strategy, regardless of industry or company size. Small startups and large corporations both capitalize on content marketing to build a brand's relevancy, authority and following. Content marketing is the present and future of all marketing - an investment you simply can't afford to overlook.

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This article, "My Numbers Are Fine – Do I Need to Invest in Content Marketing?" was first published on Small Business Trends