Today, every other company chooses to implement
unique marketing strategies to establish themselves as experts in the industry.
To achieve this objective content marketing comes as a handy tool to increase
the company’s credibility, shorten the sales cycle, create thought leadership
by educating customers and building relationships.
Content Marketing involves use of various written
and audio-video content to market your product or services in a much more
effective manner with the intent of increasing sales and ROI.
Considering today’s evolving online market
scenario, you can opt for –
Blogs, webzine or articles in print, videos,
podcasts, webinars, speeches, workshops, interviews, infographics, white paper,
case studies, newsletters, ebooks and much more. In fact, a balance of both
offline and online content is desirable for better outreach.
Taking this to the next level, you must be clear
about – what to publish, how to publish, where to publish, frequency of publication
for effectively marketing your content and your business. Whilst planning,
consider content marketing to act as a communication channel which permits you
as a business owner to interact with your clients and other way round. Not only
are you supposed to promote and market your product/service but also offer
customer service and support.
On saying this, content marketing requires you to
be a perfectionist of sorts especially when offering
- New product/service information – Offer genuine/authentic information
- After sales advice and support – Be prompt and capable of handling all sorts of customer issues related to sales or functionalities
- Customer Engagement – Be responsive in acknowledging customer feedback, posts on social media channels. Believe us it works!!
The preferred channels which have been tried,
tested and delivered wonderful results are –
Get traffic via Blog – Considered as an informational site with customized themes and more, blog is known to be a preferred source of dissemination of information to the customers. Thereby leading to high traffic and high search visibility which implies increase in SEO rankings of the blog and site linked to it.
Promote
through Social Media – In
today’s scenario, you are dealing with customers both real and virtually,
making it even more imperative to reach out and stay in touch with them on a
regular basis. Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
Instagram, Pinterest offer a viable platform in their distinctive style.
Be selective in being
available across these channels, but ensure that you are quite prompt on the
ones you have decided to be socially active. Acknowledging customer’s feedback,
sharing, retweeting and even liking goes a long way in building up customer
engagement and support. Try to be as innovative as possible for accelerating
customer engagement to the next level.
For instance, if a
hotel guest tweets a picture of the scenic view from your hotel room, you can
acknowledge the guest with a ‘Thank You’ and retweet it to let your followers
know and recognize the customer as one of the amazing guests. This will make
the customer feel special and make the hotel stay even more memorable!
If you are finding it
quite cumbersome to handle social media, you can seek the help of third party
tools to monitor, track and even post your messages, tweets and more as per
schedule. Through these tools, you will get analytical data which will help you
understand your social media traffic and effectively handle it.
Avoid
the Sales Pitch –
Customers are always wary of online sales tactics and pitches. Try to be as
subtle as possible and keep a soft sales pitch. You can be gently persuasive in
engaging a customer rather than afford to lose out the one coming your way.
Remember, you need to win the trust of the customers and build up customer
loyalty rather than pound him away with your sales promotions. You could engage
them by offering valuable guides on how to use your products, product reviews,
useful tips and hints. This will build up your reliability factor and the
number of people following you.
People visit your
website or your social media platforms to get more information and not to
experience hard sales pitch. If you sell, people tend to lose interest.
Instead, give them what they are looking for. Give some valuable information
through your blogs and share it on the social media platforms. We bet you will
have people coming back to your website for more!
For instance, if you
are Travel Company, you can post a blog about ‘Tips to travel the world with a
shoe-string budget’ or ‘How to save money on your hotel stay in India’ or
something on similar lines.
Audio-Video
Content – Amazingly
true, human beings believe more in what they see and hear, hence the need to
upload videos for more social media leverage. Making the right videos,
optimizing them right and sharing them across popular media channels such as
Vine, Instagram, YouTube have been considered as one of the most preferred
channels for brand promotion as well as recognition. Trust us when we suggest
that making videos is not a lengthy or expensive proposition, it can be
squeezed within a limited media budget as well. Seek out free apps which help
in making videos and also share them instantly.
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