What is content marketing and why should I bother?

If you're looking at Red Wasp's website, it's a possibility that you may be considering direct or digital marketing services and as such you may stumble across our blog. It struck me that some people coming here may not necessarily be familiar with content marketing and what it can offer. To be fair, content marketing can go by many names; corporate media, corporate publishing, branded content... the list can go on.

But what exactly is content marketing?

It is quite a broad term, but in short, content marketing is the creation and distribution of intelligent, valuable and engaging reading content for the purpose of attracting readers and subscribers and thus, engaging more existing and potential customers with your business. When talking about content, people are usually referring to a company blog. However in fairness it can refer to any type of information – web copy, news articles and even tweets. By putting fresh content on your website in the form of a blog, you are effectively communicating with your customers without really selling – and this is what content marketing is all about. As I mentioned in my first post “content is king” and it becomes more obvious when you consider what your aims are with your blog. You want to be posting original, interesting articles that keeps your readers coming back for more.

Ok, but why should I bother?

It is a fair question given that the keeping a blog running requires research and can be time consuming. More and more companies these days are starting blogs in order to optimise their website, with many finding it valuable to hire people or engage with digital agencies to help them write content for blog articles. The reason being that delivering relevant content to your target audience encourages your customers to buy from you.

How can a blog increase sales then?

The corporate world is cold, and a blog gives you a unique opportunity to put a face and a personality on your business. It gives your customers extra transparency and an insight into your company and helps them 'like' you. It builds trust. If you make sure you post awesome content, you'll get more subscribers on your blog, people will keep coming back to see your latest posts and hopefully share them if they found it interesting – all helping to increase web visits and build relationships with potential customers. Once that relationship and trust is made with a prospect, selling to them suddenly becomes much easier.

It's not necessarily a quick process and it takes time to build. The more interesting articles you post, the more readers you'll get, the more your content will be shared. Utilising your social media strategy to help share your blog posts and interact with other companies can help speed this up. Once you have this running smoothly, you can combine these digital methods with traditional direct marketing methods to really help drive forward and bring solid new business leads, and that is precisely what we do at Red Wasp.

Hopefully you found this interesting, if so follow us on Twitter @RedWasp_MKTG

If you'd like to find out more about how Red Wasp can assist your company's digital to direct strategy, give us a call on 02392 893900

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