Content marketing represents a true commitment, not simply a campaign. It doesn’t imply only running a marketing campaign through a series of social media posts or blog posts.
It represents a commitment from the product/service provider to the potential/current customer to create and share relevant, objective and quality content on regular basis.
Marketing by content is now known to be a well established type of digital marketing that drives success to a huge number of business worldwide.
Content usage has skyrocketed
After the Covid-19 pandemic, it is estimated that content usage has increased by 207%.
This means that users now are consuming more and more content online in its different forms.
This fact has made business turn into using digital marketing, specially marketing by content, to promote what they offer and drive more sales.
On the other hand, the increase in content consumption means that people are now more picky.
To do content marketing now, you have tons of work to do other than simply creating a design or writing a basic selling copy.
You should now aim at creating content that resonates with what your potential audience is engaging with.
Selling by providing
When we think of content marketing, it’s basically selling by providing.
You provide your community of potential customers with quality content that answers their questions and provide them with relevant solutions to their problems.
By doing this, you gain their trust.
In marketing, trust can be a gold mine.
When a potential customer trusts you, you become his/her single source of truth for whatever he/she is looking for or trying to solve relative to your niche.
This includes you offering them your own products as solutions to the problems they’re having.
Building a community
The core of content marketing is the ability to build a community.
According to Cambridge definition, a community is:
The people living in one particular area or people who are considered as a unit because of their common interests, social group, or nationality.
In today’s digital era, every business should embrace building a community with their potential/current customers.
Building a community is not about one-side sharing of content. You can’t say that a business has built a community successfully just because they created an Instagram page on which they share daily posts or so.
Community is about 2-ways sharing.
It’s an active environment in which both business and customers communicate actively.
Customers will feel neglected when all the content the business shares is one-sided. They need and want to communicate, express themselves, the problems they’re facing or maybe share how good their experience is with one of your products or services.
Two-ways communication is a mean of building trust. It increases brand awareness and aids the business in establishing itself as an authoritative source of knowledge in the niche.
Long-term strategy
The true power of content marketing is that it’s a long-term strategy.
Unlike paid advertising, which in most of the cases is a short-term style of marketing, content marketing gains can remain for years.
For example, a business can create a YouTube video that answers a frequently asked question, publish it on their channel, and still get views and their brand recognized as long as the question remains relevant.
See, this sort of long-term value cannot be obtained from other means of marketing. When you run a Google Ads campaign for example, you’ll be limited by your budget, and as soon as you stop the campaign, “gains” will stop.
This doesn’t mean that paid advertising and other means of active advertising don’t work.
Actually they’re extremely effective and many businesses rely on them to make profit.
However, marketing through providing quality content can get the business many benefits beside being long-term strategy, including:
– Helping the business establish itself in the market.
– Getting the brand recognized by a huge number of people who are using those marketing channels such as social medial platforms.
– Around 8.5 billions daily searches happen on Google. Without investing in a quality content which is SEO friendly, businesses will lose the chance to get a bunch of this huge organic free traffic.
Read more: What do you need to balance when doing SEO
Content Marketing is effective
In a survey published by Content Marketing Institute, it was found that 73% of B2B marketers and 70% of B2C marketers use content marketing as part of their strategy.
This gives a clear indication about how effective content marketing is.
Although paid search results on Google get 1.5 times more conversions from clicks than organic search results, when you put the factor of cost into consideration, this is definitely an investment that every business should consider.
Organic traffic by definition is free, and even at lower conversion rates, it’s still an extremely effective way to promote your services and products, as stated by 96% of marketing decision-makers.
Case Study: Speetar Health
On April 2022, I took the lead on Speetar Health project as a marketing lead.
Speetar is a Libyan tele-medicine company which provides tele-medicine related services through a dedicated website and application for people in MENA region.
I was responsible for creating a full, organic content marketing plan for social media and website.
Back in April 2022, Speetar blog was getting about 283 organic visits every month (Semrush).
At the course of 6 months, we managed to publish 129 short-form medical articles targeting mostly long-tail keywords.
| Month (2022) | April | May | June | July | August | September | October |
| Organic Traffic | 283 | 448 | 302 | 330 | 235 | 776 | 818 |
Considering that Speetar’s domain was relatively new, the tough competitiveness in the medical niche and the fact that major changes were made to the structure of the website frequently, this was a huge success.
We were able to beat huge companies like Mawdoo3 and Webteb for many keywords just by sharing quality content in the form of short-form articles without using any active link building strategies.
On social media, we created and published 2 main categories of content:
Informational content that aimed at increasing people awareness relative to some medical conditions, this was in the form of:
– Infographs and text posts published on Facebook and Instagram.
– Posts related to world health/diseases days.
– Informational videos shooted by Speetar’s doctors and published on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Promotional content related to Speetar’s different medical services.
Ultimately, Our goals were:
– To increase Speetar’s brand awareness.
– To serve +2M people by providing medical consultations and medical content.
– To get +50K app users.
Luckily, we were able achieve our goals, and more !
We were able to get around 80K new app users during the project period, which represented again a huge success.
The take-home message
Content marketing is a commitment to provide value.
That’s it.
All other details come secondary.
If a business succeeds at providing value to their customers on a regular basis, regardless of the marketing platform used (social media or blogs and SEO), conversions and profits will come naturally as a by-product.
