According to Content Marketing Institute,  “Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

The most important factor that you have to consider is not to blatantly promote your Brand but to entice and spark interest in your product or service.

This type of marketing involves creating and sharing online material. These are in the form of videos, blogs and include your social media posts too. Content is one of the best ways to get your brand or business noticed. It allows your audience to see you as the Subject Matter Expert (SME) within your niche as you are the one providing them with valuable information about your product or service.

It is worth it to include content marketing into your strategy as it generates approximately 3 X more leads than traditional marketing . In addition, it costs a massive 62% less than traditional marketing!

Check out these Content Marketing Statistics in 2017

Let’s look at some of the ways that content marketing will benefit you.

YOU TUBE MARKETING

Did you know that You Tube is the second largest search engine? Did you know that Google favours You Tube results for certain types of queries in SERP’s? This means that you will have the opportunity of having your video accessed by over 1 billion users. Here are some other impressive YouTube stats:

• YouTube has over a billion users — almost one-third of all people on the Internet — and every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views.
• YouTube overall, and even YouTube on mobile alone, reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S.
• More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices.
• YouTube has launched local versions in more than 88 countries.
• You can navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages (covering 95% of the Internet population).

This is exactly why 48% of marketers [https://www.hubspot.com/marketing-statistics] will also be making use of You Tube as part of their content distribution channel in 2017.

FACEBOOK MARKETING

Social Media Guru, Gary Vaynerchuk said “When you are David and you are playing against Goliath, you have to do David tactics. And our little slingshot with a rock right now is Facebook ads,”

It’s no wonder that American fashion brand Tommy Hilfiger used Facebook video to allow users to order merchandise on their mobile phones to launch their “See Now, Buy Now” policy. The iconic fashion brand received a 2 X higher engagement rate as well as a 2.2 X higher return than what they spent on the ad.

LINKEDIN MARKETING

In a previous post, we mentioned that LinkedIn is responsible for most B2B Marketing leads. To be a little more specific, over 80% of social media leads are derived from LinkedIn. Half of the users on this predominantly professional platform prefer using a contact that they have on the platform.

The platform is more than just a place to meet other professionals; it creates a medium to publish interesting articles relevant to business topics. According to the Content Marketing guru, Neil Patel,  a definitive strategy is vital to successful content marketing.

INSTAGRAM MARKETING

Instagram has over 600 Million users and 8 Million businesses marketing on the platform . Were you aware that 70% of those users searched for a brand on the platform? This could’ve been you that they were searching for.

Beanpole, a Korean fashion brand was able to increase traffic to their website by 1.5 X than their set goal on Instagram [https://business.instagram.com/success/beanpole].

SNAPCHAT MARKETING

If your target audience is between the ages of 13 and 25, then that is where you need to focus your marketing efforts on. More than 150 Million people use Snapchat every day and the numbers are growing .  Vans is the perfect case study – after running their ad on Snapchat, they improved purchased intent by 37%.

PINTEREST MARKETING

Pinterest has in excess of 150 Million users that are available at your fingertips . To make matters even better, 87% of pinners bought products because of Pinterest as well as 93% of pinners used Pinterest to plan a future purchase.

BLOGGING

Blogging is a superb way to increase the success rate of your content marketing strategy. Especially since the numbers show that B2B companies that blogged more than 11 x per month achieved 3 x more traffic to their website than those that blogged at most once a month. In a world where video is taking over the internet by storm, businesses that focus on blogs still reap the rewards for creating fresh content.

It is important to provide high quality fresh content. The aim is to teach rather than sell your product or service. An effective strategy results in inbound lead generation, traffic and improved ranking in SERP. These all are high contributors to brand awareness, customer loyalty as well as assist with brand authority. All these elements lead to a positive effect on revenue.

Other content marketing strategies to consider:

• Local SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
• Inbound Marketing
• Adwords Marketing

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