Content Marketing – Where It’s at in 2013
The buzz for 2013 has centered on the need for content marketing to be a crucial aspect in your online marketing efforts moving forward. This might be a term you’ve heard yet not know precisely what it means. Content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and publishing fresh content for your visitors. This manifests in a variety of forms, from seemingly simple blog posts, to articles, reports, whitepapers, videos, audio podcasts, ebooks, and more. We live in a world that craves information, and the more of it you are able to supply visitors to your sites, the more authority you will earn in not only their eyes, but also the search engines as well. They can then reward you with higher rankings, more traffic, links, and ultimately sales.
Content marketing is getting more and more popular
According to BusinessBolts.com, 74 percent of businesses plan to do more content marketing in 2013. Only 4 percent are opting not to. These companies have realized content marketing’s distinct advantages, a few of which are cost-effectiveness, nearly instant results, and near complete control over the process. An article or blog post may be written, for example, and then posted not only on your own site, but also mentioned in your social networks, repurposed into a video or audio (or both!) and otherwise disseminated over the internet. This can multiply your reach significantly, and your entire content marketing campaign can bear fruit very fast.
Want an example of how content marketing made a difference?
The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that had watched as their sales tanked due to the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now impossible. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan went on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and in just a short time had not only recovered but exceeded pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!
