In today’s world, the marketing sphere has changed drastically. The digital world has pushed for and increased the popularity of content marketing. So what is content marketing?

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According to The Content Marketing Institute,

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Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

This means that there are three key points to a content marketing strategy:

• The content is valuable, relevant, and consistent
• Your audience is well defined
• You help push your audience into becoming paying customers

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Typically, a go-to content strategy may involve blog posts and social media engagement. However, with a strong content team or a marketing agency, you can also create video infomercials, how-to tutorials, regular email newsletters, host workshops and webinars and more. The possibilities are endless!

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How does content creation help a business?

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The main reason content marketing is now reigning in the digital space is that it is both effective and inexpensive. Content marketing has a high ROI for both B2b and B2C brands simply because the content is now easily accessible and spreads quickly. It reaches your audience very easily.

This also means content creation plays a direct role in your brand’s performance. How? Read on!

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Improve brand awareness

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The whole point of content marketing is to make your brand visible to your target audience. You cannot improve sales if your audience doesn't know you exist. Many marketing agencies offer a go-to marketing strategy when you launch your business. However, a good marketing strategy keeps building on itself. Improving your brand awareness is a continuous process. The idea is to keep reaching a larger audience.

Regular and high-quality content creation is the key. Creating blog posts, graphic posts, animations, infomercials, and more can make your brand look like more than just a product to be purchased. Research by HubSpot shows that the audience reacts well to content like "how-to" or "explainer" videos. These videos have a higher chargeability which means that it reaches a larger audience faster.

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Generating new leads

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A natural progression from the last, tailored content can help generate new leads. However, a good content strategy is based on research. Remember to:

• Conduct market research to track the pain points
• Survey the performance of your competition
• Create an audience persona that helps you understand your demographic

Well researched content can help double down on the main points of your target audience. Readers often return to blogs and videos that serve a specific need. This raises your brand's value for members of your target audience. These regular consumers are potential 'new sales.' In fact, research showed that nearly 84% of people chose to buy online products based on blog posts.

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Increase conversion rate

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If you've been working with a marketing agency, you have probably already come across the concepts of "conversion rate" and "bounce rate." What are they? Simply put, the conversion rate is the number of people who choose to become paid customers. On the other hand, your bounce rate is the number of people choosing to leave your website. A high bounce rate means that your content is not appealing to your target audience.

For example, consider the marketing for Amul butter. Everyone in India knows and chuckles at the cartoons we see on billboards. But often, these cartoons have very little to do with butter and actually show the distinctive branding and art style that we associate with the brand. We are now so used to Amul butter's constant presence around us that we unknowingly pick up this butter brand at the supermarket.  

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This same strategy works for online content creation. A good content marketing strategy is built for conversion rate optimization. Personalized, informative, and authentic content is the fastest way to improve your conversion rate. Your consumers will return to your brand if they believe it is made for their needs.

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Improve your ranking on Google SERP

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There is no denying it; content marketing is centred around SEO and Google SERP. The latter stands for Search Engine Results Page. This means your content will directly determine where you are placed on Google. Improving your ranking means you are the first result the user sees when they google something relevant to your brand. This may be harder than it looks. With Google constantly changing its algorithm to improve the user experience, content needs to improve too.

Today, relevant, SEO-friendly, helpful content is the best way to improve your ranking. The more clicks you generate, the more your online traffic increases. This means that Google sees you as a valued source of information to the audience and pushes you higher and higher in rank. In turn, this means your traffic will increase even more and help improve brand awareness and trust. This happy loop can make you a top brand in your field.  

With the internet freely accessible to everyone, commercial marketing is now affordable to any new entrepreneur. You can easily reach a global audience with social media profiles, blogs, and consumer-centric websites. This means content creation is central to any modern marketing strategy.

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