Tag - Content Marketing

How to use your Website for Content Marketing?

Content marketing includes the use of content, social media and SEO to market a business through steps like - Create, Optimise, Publish, promote and measure.

In the last few years, the marketing landscape in the country has changed significantly. While in the earlier times, you could just put out an advertisement and get your product promoted, audiences today have become smarter. The brands whose content adds value in some way or the other to people’s lives are the ones that are more prone to success in the long run. Likewise, you can use your website for content marketing in a cost effective way.

It is no doubt then, that a large number of companies, no matter how large or small, are investing heavily on putting out content that not just promotes their own business but also creates significant value to their customers’ lives. Marketers, individually or as part of a marketing communication agency, are now placing their bets on creating content relevant to their industry, leading to the emergence of content hubs as a potential marketing tool.

So, what exactly is a content hub? To simplify, content hubs are a repository of pages, containing your best content, focused around the area your company operates in, which is also intrinsically relevant to the company’s audience. It serves 4 major purposes:

1. Positioning – positioning involves highlighting the utility or day-to-day happenings of a particular company through content. It might include stories of employees, business partners or how a particular offering from the company helped a customer and created awareness about their brand in people’s minds.

2. Engagement – This kind of content talks mostly about the company’s culture and brand ethos. It is mostly aimed towards converting the prospective users into the consumers of the product.

3. Expertise – Taking the example of Hubspot, such kind of content tries to educate the people with domain specific content or give solutions to their day-to-day problems, in terms of personal or professional growth. Hubspot, a popular marketing software company, regularly publishes content focused around how customers and marketers can use its tools and services to accelerate the growth of their business or learn a new skill set.

4. Influence – one of the hottest trends in the world of marketing and digital is the emergence of influencer marketing. Companies create content around the utility derived by influencers or thought leaders from using their products.

A pertinent question that companies often are confused about is if they should create a standalone content hub to put out content or should they integrate it inside their corporate portal itself?
To answer this, a few considerations always play an important role, which are as follows:

Does your website enjoy search engine visibility?

If your company’s corporate website has a higher visibility and ranking on the search engines, you can integrate the content hub well within itself, since any web page that is associated with a high ranked website can easily gain traffic and visits without having to create an entire funnel again to drive engagement with your content. In such a scenario, creating another domain to serve as your content hub is debatable.

Do you want to be seen as an authority in the industry you operate in?

Most often, companies that create a standalone content hub want to be seen as an authoritative figure in the industry without having any biases towards its own products or services. For example, international brand LÓREAL debuted a website called ‘Fab Beauty’ a few years ago that took into perspective, the entire beauty industry without any hard selling or bias towards its own products.

If your company is planning to not be 100% unbiased in approach and doesn’t have multiple products or services to offer, it’s preferable to move your content to your own corporate website rather than investing in a separate online entity.

Is your website an idle website?

More often than not, corporate or enterprise websites do not change much with time. As we wrote about it some time back, an idle website creates a negative impression of the company in the customer or business partner’s mind and also brings the credibility of your business in question.

An idle website also creates a competitive disadvantage for the company, since your competitor’s fresh and regularly updated website not only creates a good impression on prospective customers but also leads to increase in traffic and visibility of the organisation on the web.

Putting out fresh and relevant content is hence, a prerogative to success in today’s content marketing landscape.

Lead generation written on a pic of a city's skyline. Lead generation from website can help a lot

Do you want to generate leads with your content?

Content marketing, especially the subscription and email newsletters, can provide analytical, real-time data for your company to generate newer leads. Having a content hub gives you the power to use data and target new prospects.
That is why, it is vital to analyse if your corporate website is good enough to generate subscriptions on its own.

What is your brand’s positioning?

A market leading brand, which enjoys certain popularity among the masses can invest in driving its thought leadership over to a new domain. Since it has been around for a long time, a well-positioned brand enjoys the trust of the customer.

If you are a new brand that wants to invest in creating a standalone content hub, it will require patience and constant trial-and-error to finally be able to see significant results and engagement for your content.

Get in touch with Ascezen Consulting today to know how we can create and run a content intensive website for your business.

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Content Marketing Strategy: An Unbeatable Practice

illustration of a hand holding a tool. Words "Strategy" and "Info" are printed to indicate the importance of content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing has become the heart of marketing strategies and rightly so. Why is Content Marketing Strategy: An Unbeatable Practice? It is because not only does it help a business to grow but also nurtures relationships with customers – an aspect that distinguishes it from traditional marketing. The idea is to inform and educate your customers about your business and services. Today, consumers have become less likely to respond to traditional tactics and would rather make decisions based on their judgement. They don’t like to be just sold things- a behaviour that holds true for both B2C and B2B customers.

This is where content marketing comes into the picture. Unlike traditional marketing, it relies on building a trustworthy rapport with the prospective customers and instead of creating a new demand, content marketing focuses on anticipating and meeting an existing need for information.

Your Content Marketing Strategy must aim to:

  • Provide credible information to consumers
  • Generate and attract attention
  • Build a relationship with consumers
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Improve online sales
  • Increase the customer base
  • Encourage brand loyalty

 

Given how effective content marketing has proven to be in converting leads into sales, it is no surprise that everyone is trying to churn out more and more information. However, not all of this information is credible or useful.  The result of which is a cluttered digital environment where consumers are swamped with mediocre content; a situation which is not favourable either for the businesses or the consumers.

Depending on the organisational goals, every business needs a different approach to stand out among the rest. Content marketing is a process that needs to be constantly updated to recognise and predict the information requirements of a specific audience, making it vital to strategize accordingly.

At Ascezen Consulting, we take the time to thoroughly understand the requirements of our clients before suggesting the following solutions for an appropriate strategy:

Blogs

Because they are so accessible, blogs are the perfect platform to build relationships with potential customers. People enjoy reading them and if regularly updated with well-written and informative articles, they can prove to be an efficient way of converting leads into sales.

Videos

Videos are more engaging and are likely to leave a more lasting impact on people in comparison to textual content. They can be shared on the organisation’s website, blog posts or social media posts.

Social Media

Social media gives you the freedom to decide how and what you want to communicate to the people. Its ability to let organisations interact with its target audience definitely makes it the most powerful channel for content marketing.

Infographics

Infographics is one of the most effective methods to bundle lot of information in a way that is clear, visually appealing and yet can be easily retained by the audience. A simple and clean design will go a long way in spreading the message without overwhelming the audience.

Images

Adding relevant images to social media and blog posts or simply using them on their own can greatly enhance the utility of the message being put across. Humans are visual learners and as cliché as it may sound, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words.

Brochures & White Papers

Brochures and white papers are useful tools to disseminate complex information.  They can include images and graphs.  They are quite useful when it comes to showcasing areas of expertise and persuading potential consumers.

Apps

Mobile apps help businesses to reach out to a wider audience by distributing product information. They have also proven to be helpful in building customer loyalty as it makes consumers feel more engaged with an organisation.

The right content marketing strategy can take you ahead of your competitors and help you reach your goals. Get in touch with us to know how we can help you build an effective content marketing strategy that will benefit you and your business.

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