Heading into 2015, there will once again be all manner of tips and tricks handed out by web gurus as to what kinds of marketing mixes will work best for the year ahead. And once again opinions will be divided in a big way, as half of the world continues to focus on search engine optimisation (SEO) with growing exclusivity, while others back away from the Google –obsessed way of doing things.
However, delve into the recommendations of anyone worth listening to and chances are you’ll come across at least one universal similarity – the importance of content writing services in the marketing. Throughout 2014, the importance and power of content marketing have really begun to shine through, though it won’t be until 2015 that the approach begins to show its true potential.
Content Marketing – What Is It?
Perhaps the very best and the most common way of describing content marketing is as the art of ‘selling without selling’. On one side of the spectrum you have your classic hard-sell ads and marketing pushes – ‘Buy Now or Miss Out!’ or ‘Buy in the Next 30 Seconds Or Else!’ – that kind of thing. And right on the other end of the scale lies content marketing, which doesn’t use any kind of direct selling techniques at all and nor does it involve begging folk to buy or invest in anything.
The idea with content marketing is that the brand or business does such an amazing job of appealing to its target audience that the products and services on offer sell themselves. In the long-term, it’s all about gaining the faith and loyalty of clients to such an extent that you don’t technically ever have to advertise to them again. Think about it – chances are there are dozens of products you buy every week from the same brands, despite the fact that you haven’t seen a single advert for them in years. Content marketing is geared toward breeding this kind of blind though well-earned trust and represents a much more powerful approach for the long-term than conventional selling techniques.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
When you need to know something about any given subject, chances are there will be a website you head to instinctively. This represents the very core of what content marketing is all about – building an all-round resource that becomes the first or the only port of call for your primary target audience members. Of course, this isn’t the kind of thing that happens overnight and nor does it happen randomly, but instead requires a heavy and long-term investment in content creation and curation of the highest quality.
Anyone can build a site that sells thing, but it takes something special to create a site that really hits home with its target audience. The trick is to look beyond selling to what it is that lights a fire in the hearts and souls of those you’re reaching out to. It could be the latest industry news, your own views on life, tips and tricks on how to do things better or really anything that gives them reason to come back time and time again. In addition, it’s also of crucial importance to build a strong and dependable two-way channel of communication in order to remove the usual client-brand barriers.
Earning trust and building a reputation takes time and effort – you can’t force either, they need to be earned.
Why Content Marketing Matters so Much
The primary reason content marketing matters so much is, as mentioned above, the fact that conventional hard-sell marketing methods are near-universally hated and ignored these days. They do nothing for a brand’s reputation and also do little to encourage brand loyalty, which in turn means that as a long-term strategic marketing element they’re pretty much worthless.
What’s more, experts like Jenkinson & Associates say it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get ahead by relying on things like SEO alone. Not only is Google constantly changing the rules, but even getting a ton of traffic to any given website in the first place isn’t nearly enough to guarantee even a single conversion. Web users these days expect a quite incredible amount from every site they visit and if the content of the site doesn’t hit home immediately with their needs and interests, you have no chance – that’s why content marketing matters so much.
Perhaps most importantly of all, the very idea of content marketing is such that it appeals to human nature in general, and for that reason represents one of the only marketing strategies ever devised that can be guaranteed as timelessly powerful.
