Do you know why good restaurants receive Michelin stars and what they have to do with the tire brand of the same name? This is no coincidence, but an example of very good content marketing.
Yes, the tire manufacturer. michelin began publishing a little red book in 1900 called “Restaurants and Hotels”, which was intended to increase the demand for automobiles, and thus also increase the demand for tires. The book was distributed free of charge and contained useful information for motorists, such as maps, instructions for repairing a car, changing tires, and a list of gas stations, restaurants, and hotels in the United States.
The Red Book soon became a concept and the stars awarded to restaurants still play an important role today.
So content marketing is nothing new, but it explains why it’s more effective today than ever.
An example content marketing model where business marketing can no longer be turned off
To fully understand the power of content marketing, I’ll give you an example of successful content marketing. The example company is us.
Our site collects a large number of five-digit visitors every month completely organically from Google. So completely free. The good thing about this is that we will not be able to disable our marketing unless we close our site or close Google. That is the biggest difference between paid advertising and content marketing. Paid advertising allows you to attract visitors to your page when you pay for them. If you stop campaigning, there will be no visitors. So advertising is nowhere near as scaling as content marketing.
Here’s how to compare paid advertising and content marketing. Paid advertising is cheating and content marketing is online fishing. If you want to put fish on the dinner table today, then you need to chop. It requires you to be active, and you can’t fish if the trap isn’t in your hand. With content marketing, you lower the net (or even hundreds of nets) into the water and only fish later. With the trap, you can never scale your catch the same way you lower hundreds of nets into the water.
Of course, keep in mind that paid advertising on Facebook, for example, is a superior way to create a new need for your customers, which is difficult to do with content marketing alone. Therefore, the channels and modes of operation are never mutually exclusive, but mutually supportive. However, content marketing can be considered the backbone of everything, because paid advertising always leads to some content.
How can a company get to a position where its marketing can no longer be turned off?
The answer is simply strategic and purposeful content marketing. For us, that means we’ve published two blog posts a week for five years. There are now over 500 blog entries. You can read in this blog post how we use marketing automation to support content marketing to get a lot of translated leads from our huge number of visitors.
Content marketing cannot be turned off, which makes it the most powerful form of marketing of all.
The most important thing in content marketing is to start with it. Of course, it’s also important to build buyer personas, create a good content strategy, and well-defined content marketing goals, but doing it yourself comes first. When you start now, there will be 50 more blogs on your site in a year. Still, no one can produce content marketing because the quality of the copy plays a critical role in the effectiveness of content marketing. Each sentence should assure the reader that they should continue reading. If this doesn’t happen, the text will practically go to waste.
In the image below, you can see how the text input angle should start to be outlined. The purchase decision of buyers on the left is guided by different factors. In its simplest form, one wants to save money, another wants time, and a third wants peace of mind. In reality, the drivers are much more concrete, so they must be discovered through interviews with clients.
Creating Buyer Personalities
We made you a free workbook. With the help of the workbook, you can create buyer personas and map out what type of content and marketing each stage of the purchase funnel requires. You can download the Buyer Staff Workbook here.
Download the workbook
Why does content marketing work?
Change in the purchase process
Let’s start with how the Human Buying Process has changed and how it has contributed to increasing the effectiveness of content marketing. Before the Internet and search engines, a customer didn’t have many ways to get information about the product he wanted. The seller of the product was often the only one who could tell more about the product.
During the search engines, the situation has changed. Information about products, services and problems can be found easily and quickly. This has led to a trend where people look for information before even contacting the seller. They Google their problem or the names of the products they are looking for and quickly find a wealth of information on the topic they are looking for.
This has dramatically changed people’s buying behavior. According to research, even in B2B marketing, the marketing part has largely taken over the sales part, even 70-80 percent of consumers look up product information online even before contacting the seller.
ad fatigue
Another factor that increases the effectiveness and opportunity of content marketing is the so-called “ad fatigue”. We see so many marketing messages every day that we have subconsciously learned to block them. So that we do not notice the ads.. Depending on your billing method, we are exposed to approximately 5,000 ads each day. So the competition for people’s attention is fierce.
This is why companies have switched from large-scale outbound marketing to inbound marketing.
The number of marketing channels and the advertising they display has skyrocketed. For example, when you log into Facebook, every moment around 1,500 updates compete to appear in your news feed.
In content marketing you don’t interrupt people, like in traditional marketing, you help and they find you when searching for information.
Scalability
Content marketing scales dramatically when you create a lot of quality content for your site in line with your content strategy. Individual content is like small salespeople or customer service representatives who answer your customers’ questions no matter what time of day. When these little salespeople and customer service reps are in the army, you’ll start getting more and more visitors to your site and constantly editing them to turn them into leads ready to buy.
→ Reading tip: An online content marketing magazine where four content marketers reveal their own tips for sales promotion content marketing.
How does content marketing work?
cars
Content marketing can also be called assistive marketing. The objective is produce content that really helps and solves people’s problems. Michelin is a good example of this. Hardly anyone would be interested in a little red book about car tires, but a book with all the information related to motorsports is something else. create value.
Get your content to the right people
Social networks are here to stay and almost everyone uses them in some way on a daily basis. When you produce great content, test and find out where your dream customers hang out and make sure they see your content. This is called content promotion and it is a very effective way to attract more readers to your content.
Find when you’re looking
Second An important part of content marketing is search engine optimization.. If your site is not found effectively on Google, the performance of your content marketing campaign will be limited; then you can create any good content. So make sure your site is undergoing search engine optimization to help create your customers. content is at the top of search results.
Carelessly implemented search engine optimization is the most common reason many content marketing campaigns fail. If you don’t include search engines in your content, you will lose valuable organic search engine traffic. When people search for information and products on Google, they are closer to making a purchase than when they see an ad on TV. for instance. So Google brings very valuable traffic to your pages.
Keep your marketing up to date
If your content only talks about your business and praises how good your products are, you can be sure that your customers will not be interested in you. On the other hand, if you produce really useful information in many different formats (video, text, images, podcasts) and solve your customers’ everyday problems, you can be sure that you will be remembered. And when it comes time to buy, you are at least one of the options considered.
Content marketing is a long-term job that requires a content strategy and calendar. You also need to know your customers very precisely.
- What problems keep them awake at night?
- What motivates them?
- How can you help them?
Effective content marketing requires perseverance and constantly deadly content production. The results will not come immediately. In many cases, the work does not begin to bear fruit until months later. When the work is done carefully, good content marketing will increase your results in a lasting and constant way.