Welcome to our first blogpost, my name is Melissa Martínez, CEO at Chaskis Digital a Digital Marketing Agency based in Barranquilla, Colombia. Our mission is to create value to the startups and entrepreneurship industry, sharing relevant content to help ideas reach their full market potential through digital marketing. So here we are, talking about a new era of marketing strategies that is revolutionizing the way companies communicate to their audience; Content Marketing.
You’ve probably heard the word “content marketing” so many times, but maybe you don’t know exactly what it is.
According to the Content Marketing Institute:
“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.”
The whole purpose of this article is based on the last keyword: “ Drive profitable customer action”. We believe that content marketing is not only an excellent way to generate engagement to our online audience, but also an important element of every company’s commercial and business strategy.
Content marketing is about giving before receiving, the idea is to share valuable information with your audience. You get to understand their needs and way of living, so you use your content to help them resolve their problems. The result will be that our potential clients find our content, find value in it and when they decide to contact us, they’re already convinced to work with us due to the credibility we created as a company through our content.
There are many ways to use content as a marketing strategy; infographics, web pages, podcasts, videos, books, eBooks, white papers, presentations, public speaking or blogs. Those are a few examples of content marketing. But no matter which format you choose to share your content, what is important is how you create value with this information for your potential clients, so they don't think twice before using your service or buying your product.
So, why should one use content marketing in business strategy?
According to the marketing and sales theory, the buying cycle (the process someone normally follows to buy a product), has 4 steps:
- Awareness: When a potential customer becomes aware of a problem or a need in their life.
- Research: After being aware of the solution, they make a research to educate themselves.
- Consideration: Your potential customer starts comparing different products of different brands in order to find the one that matches their needs.
- Purchase: Customer finally makes the purchase.
Content marketing is meant to be important for your commercial strategy in the first two steps of the buying process, by educating those potential customers in solutions for their problems and also indirectly, making awareness on how what you offer can be their best choice.
"The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal if executed correctly. We haven’t spent a dime on our own content marketing, or even that much time. 95% of the success we’ve experienced with content marketing can be traced to a handful of articles I’ve written, adding up to perhaps 20 hours of work." Josh Steimle, CEO at MWI.
Starting to think about creating value to your audience before selling your product with more and more advertising, can be the key for a successful commercial strategy. If you don’t know where to start and how to add value with content, start asking your existing customers, they have all the answers you need to start with content.
A good source I always recommend to start learning on how to create a consistent content marketing strategy is the HubSpot Academy , they have many tools and resources to start your journey on content marketing.
If you want to learn more about digital marketing strategies for your business, don't forget to subscribe to this blog and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
