Does Content Marketing Work?

Content marketing is an effective strategic internet marketing strategy focused on creating and regularly distributing truly relevant, valuable, and consistent content that is directly connected to your business to draw and maintain a clearly defined audience and, eventually, to drive highly profitable consumer response. Instead of pitching products or services to your audience, you’re offering truly helpful and authentic information to your customers and prospects to help them resolve their problems. The power of this marketing strategy is the ability to position your brand and your company as experts in their own field. It’s an incredibly powerful medium that allows for a much more direct communication with your audience than traditional marketing practices allow. Content marketing provides a mechanism to engage your audience in a meaningful way that can bring real value to the relationship.

So how do you know if Content Marketing is right for your business? According to some leading market researchers, the best way to determine whether or not Content Marketing is working for your business is to begin by establishing goals. Goals like, “Would I like to see more sales on my next AdSense campaign,” or “Do I want to generate leads for my next SEO campaign” can help guide your Content Marketing strategy. Content Marketing should be built around specific, quantifiable, and measurable goals so that Content Marketing becomes a part of your overall SEO strategy and a major component of your advertising and engagement strategy. You’ll also want to conduct your own research to learn what your target audience is looking for, what they might be looking for, and what they might not be looking for.

Once you’ve established goals, start researching how you can implement the strategy. Some of the biggest Content Marketers have used social media marketing strategy to attract millions of visitors to their blogs and websites. Others have used search engine optimization (SEO) to build link popularity to their sites. No matter which method you choose, the key to success is Content Marketing that is consistent with your marketers’ audience and objectives.

Another way to determine if content marketing works for your business is to watch the trends and activities of your competitors. As a Content Marketer, it’s important to understand what your competitors are doing to build their brands in the Content Marketing space. Is their branding consistent? What are their overall webinars, blogs, and social media marketing strategies? If they’re not using Social Media Marketing (SMM) to promote their brands and businesses, then they’re not using it to effectively drive quality content marketing to their audiences.

Lastly, analyze what type of content your competitors are producing using a long-form content format. For example, are they producing short, one-page long-form articles? Are they creating content using Google AdSense ads, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, links extracted from articles, directories, blogs, or social media accounts? If the answer is no to these questions, then your competition isn’t optimizing their websites for the Search Engines, so they’re not going to benefit from having high quality, search engine friendly content. In fact, if they’re producing long-form articles, they likely aren’t using a long-form content format because the articles are written by ghostwriters who don’t have a great deal of SEO knowledge or experience.

This is why Content Marketing has been proven to be successful, regardless of whether you’re an Internet marketing newbie or a seasoned SEO pro. Content Marketing is cost-effective when you utilize both Search Engine Optimization and email marketing. Utilize your social media marketing campaigns by writing articles, submitting them to article directories, and sharing them on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. As long as your content is SEO friendly, you’ll be able to benefit from the combined efforts of your SEO and email marketing campaigns.