Written by Ad avoidance is higher than it’s ever been. People abandon videos with preroll ads, mute or change the channel during commercial breaks, and even pay for ad blockers and “ad-free experiences.”
You can understand why when you find out that the average person sees 5,000-10,000 advertisements every single day. People are buried in ads. Is it any surprise that they’ve grown ineffective? Over 615 million devices now use some form of ad blocker and it accounts for $35 billion being wasted globally every year. This fact alone should force anyone to rethink their marketing strategy.
The good news is that the modern consumer actually appreciates a far more effective and less expensive form of advertising.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing involves creating content that interests and draws in your customers organically. Instead of trying to sell directly to them, focus your efforts on understanding their needs and interests. This allows you to create and share content that connect with customers on a far more personal and trustworthy level.
“Content” comes in many forms. It can be anything from a blog post on your website to a video on social media. The main goal is simply to provide your customers with something they value. This could mean teaching them something with a step-by-step tutorial related to your industry or inspiring them with a personal story.
Why Use Content Marketing?
Content Marketing draws prospects into your sales funnel, grows brand visibility, credibility and desirability, AND engages your target market with relevant information in a way that they actually appreciate.
On top of this, it has a natural snowball effect that continues to create traffic long after you originally create and share the content. With every new blog post or video your brand will continue to rise higher and higher in search results. Over time, you’ll create 100s of passive funnels that will continually produce leads for years to come.
Content Marketing can help with more than just traffic. Providing your customers with valuable information allows them to educate themselves, which lightens the load for your customer service team. And by providing as much information as possible upfront, you filter out “bad fit” clients, which saves your sales team time and delivers them more invested leads.
How Do I Know If It’s Working?
According to HubSpot, the most common measurement of success for content marketing programs is Total Sales. This tells you a lot. First, it’s not measured like most online marketing. It’s effect isn’t most effectively tracked through detailed metrics like CPC, CRM, and CPL. These statistics still matter, but Total Sales is the most accurate representation of the full effect of Content Marketing. This is because it brings in leads slowly, builds over time, and creates brand loyalty that can’t be measured.
Disclaimer: Depending on how saturated your market already is, it will likely be 4-12 months before you start to see significant results from Content Marketing. But that’s just the nature of the beast. Direct marketing produces more instantaneous results, but they’re short lived. Wouldn’t you rather have a penny that doubles every day for a month than have a million dollars now?
Real World Example
Original branded content brands YOU as the expert in your field. One of our previous clients, SGT Knots wanted to position themselves as “The Rope Authority.” They hired us to create variety of rope-related educational content
The playlist below shows a few of the informational rope tutorials we created for SGT Knots, the #1 online rope retailer.
As of April 22, 2020 (the date this post was written), SGT Knots is the #1 online rope retailer and the results of that online campaign continue to grow on a weekly basis. They currently average about 100k monthly organic social media visitors, without spending a dime on advertising. Visit their Pinterest to see how much their average monthly views have increased since this article was written.
Statistics Worth Noting
84% of people expect brands to produce content that entertains, provides solutions and produces experiences and events. (Source: Meaningful Brands)
93% of B2B marketers use content marketing. (Source: CMI)
39% of marketing budget is spent on content marketing by the most effective B2B marketers. (Source: TopRankBlog)
Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%). (Source: Aberdeen)
karmacultivate.com 