Unlike advertising, content marketing brings value to your potential customers without the expressed intention of selling here and now.
The goal of content marketing is to induce a customer to take targeted action. By distributing useful content for free, you are solving your audience’s problems at a time and place where they are most needed. By benefiting from the content found on your site, your audience gains trust, gratitude and a willingness to buy from you (magento maintenance services).
The benefits of content marketing are that it effectively captures the audience’s attention, helps build trust and promotes the product or service in an unobtrusive way.
In the US and Europe, marketers follow the concept of social-ethical marketing, which aims to identify customer problems, address issues and meet consumer needs. The concept of strategic marketing forces one to think ahead. Advanced online retailers have long since come to realize that systematic investment in potential customers (free useful materials, gifts, bonuses) will yield more serious profits in the future than one-off activities.
Creating relevant content is the most effective strategy for promoting a website on search engines. In 2020, 72% of marketers cited quality content as a decisive factor in a website’s growth in search engine rankings. This promotion method is still in the lead at the end of 2021, although its dominance is decreasing due to the integrated use of different tactics: the selection and use of key phrases in created texts, promotion through social networks and mailing lists, internal optimization and linking, work on adaptive design and site loading speed.
Remember that quality content, together with natural link mass and mobile adaptability, are among the three most important factors in ranking sites on search engines.
Of course, it is not enough just to create useful content – you need to be able to get it to your potential customers through various channels of information dissemination: posting on the website, mailing lists, affiliate sites, promotion in thematic social media communities. But then the content starts working for you. Useful, really in-demand materials are promoted higher in search engine rankings due to the behavioural characteristics of users on the site: reducing the number of bounces increasing the time and depth of page views. People who like the content are happy to share it on social networks, forward it to friends and comment, creating unique user-generated content on your site, all for free. And links to catalogue and product pages in published content help them climb in organic search results.
Analysis of marketing activities shows that content marketing, together with content distribution via email, is more effective than the most common ways of attracting customers: contextual advertising and search engine optimization.
Useful content is not only comparative reviews and product manuals but also a way of telling you what goes on behind the scenes at your online shop: how items are packaged, packaged and delivered; who the people working in the online shop are; how returns and exchanges are handled. This is also a brilliant opportunity to compile customer reviews with real-life stories of how your products are used in the home. For construction, renovation and interior design, these could be free design projects using products from your online shop’s catalogue.
The easiest and most popular way to publish content is by posting to a blog: it can be texts, photo collections, videos, infographics, etc. For example, the most effective type of content, according to a survey of marketers, is research and reports.
At the outset of your content marketing strategy, it is very important to be clear about the audience you are working for, whose problems you are solving and whose trust you want to gain.