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55 ways content marketing can help your business [Infographic]

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Our US friends over at Skilled are just as fanatical about inbound marketing as we are. They took the time to give us their spin on things with this great guest blog on the basics of content marketing. There are some great stats in there too so most definitely worth a read!

Take it away y’all…

 

Why content marketing is important

Content marketing could be described as one of the most important types of marketing available, with over 85% of all marketers worldwide choosing to use this option to get more engagement from potential customers.

Today we live in a buyer driven environment, it is no longer completely advertising and sales people doing the job. 81% of shoppers will research online before even stepping foot in a shop, so what is the answer to guide these people to the right places? The answer it seems lies in content marketing. Businesses create high quality and valuable content in order to attract, engage and inform their audience, which subtly promotes the brand itself.

There are many benefits to this sort of marketing. It increases brand awareness as consumers will look through the web for answers to their problems, and specific brands will keep popping up. It is also a great way for businesses to get a greater reach at a lower cost than other kinds of marketing. It is not a short-term strategy, with a following growing over time. With the more content being produced, the greater the reach and therefore interested buyers.

Content marketing over paid advertising

Research suggests that on average, a consumer will engage with 11.4 pieces of content before making a purchase, with 70-80% of users ignoring paid advertisement entirely. Businesses have gradually started to move over towards this kind of marketing, and are investing more money into it. In fact, on average they will invest more money in it than any other advertising, using around 13% of their marketing budget. In the future, these numbers are only looking to increase further as both B2B and B2C marketers are predicting even larger internal budgets.

The great thing about content marketing is that comparatively speaking, it is cheap. To produce a piece of content marketing costs around 62% less than outbound marketing. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work as well by any means, often producing three times as many leads. It doesn’t have to cost anything at all in fact, if the company decides to take on the task of producing the content themselves, mediums like a blog can be produced quickly and easily internally. As long as the content that is produced is quality, gives knowledge and is something that the potential customer would actually want to read, then it will do the job.

What type of content marketing should you be considering

There are many different ways that a company can choose to content market their business, but some of the most popular include social media, articles, newsletters, blogs, magazines, videos, images, infographics, podcasts, ebooks and many more. Some are more successful than others, yet some will cost more time and money to produce, therefore companies have to consider their options wisely before making a decision on which method is best for them. One of the most successful methods is to use a combination of these methods to create a great campaign. What the future holds is still unclear, but it seems as though content marketing will feature heavily in the marketing scene.

Thanks guys!

How are you getting on with your content marketing strategy? Or haven’t yet created one? Either way, we’d be more than happy to offer our guidance so get in touch.

Here’s the infographic – packed full of stats on why it should be part of your marketing strategy


Presented by Skilled.co

 

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