As business owners, the shift from eagerness to anxiety is pretty quick and quite reasonable. Any new venture that resulted in a considerable investment needs returns as quickly as possible. A tough marketing strategy can work out really well if implemented properly. The right content, portraying the best image of your organization is the key. Today, internet marketing is primarily used for brand building since the majority of your audience form their decisions after taking opinions on the internet. There is no place better than the internet to create your brand.
Online marketing involves strategic exhibition of your products or services to the right audience at the right time. Social Media Campaigns, Search Engine Marketing, and Online Ads placement has ample variants that can be optimally utilized to meet the expected returns. The spine of every form of marketing, be it online or offline, is the content. However, this article covers ‘Content Marketing’ which in itself is a standalone form of marketing.
The spine of every form of marketing, be it online or offline, is the content
Content Marketing has a format which if followed, after proper analysis of what your target customers want, can yield perfect results. The following are the sequence of events that click, while it should be noted that it may look entirely different depending on factors like industry, business model, product, pricing, and audience. The sequences mentioned below are basically what we call a sales funnel. Awareness, Evaluation, and Purchase. We should base our content decisions on the sales to funnel to get better results.
Awareness
The first step in marketing your product or services is to create the awareness among the set of people who could potentially be your customers. This is the most important phase and its duration depends on your customer base. The content push during this phase of sales funnel must be aimed at honestly answering the queries of users, providing tips and solutions. Best examples of such content are whitepaper, blogs, social posts, ebooks, etc.
Evaluation
This is the most critical phase of the sales funnel. Here the people who are aware of you will try to evaluate your services more where you will also find a considerable size of the audience from phase one absent. These are the people who are trying to evaluate your services and comparing it with others. The content push for these users should provide a greater insight into why you are better than the rest and why you are a good fit for them. You will need to provide authentic, real-time data in the form of product webinars, case studies, FAQs, Demo Videos, etc. It is to be noted here that the content needs to engage the audience as much as possible. This is the vital, relationship building phase.
Purchase
You will find an even smaller audience here than the audience in phase two. A bulk of audience might have found a better fit elsewhere and moved into their funnel. Here you will find the audience who have started putting trust in you. The content here needs to be offering them real services in the form of free trials, dedicated emails, recent success stories, attractive business proposals, etc.
The content decision must be taken with proper evaluation of the target users. More so, the content push must be properly planned before you go ahead with content marketing. For discussing how to go ahead with an all-around content marketing strategy you can get in touch with ArcWeb SMAC right away!