There are so many Internet marketing strategies that it can be difficult to keep up — or to determine which routes might benefit your company the most. One way to avoid the problem is simply to hire an Internet marketing agency or Internet marketing consultant and trust them to take care of your marketing on their own. But even the best digital marketing company can do more for you if you take a little time to understand what it is they’re doing.
Here’s some information on what is, according to Forbes, one of the hottest Internet marketing strategies of 2014: content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Basically, content marketing is the practice of using unique, relevant information to promote your business. Typically, this takes the form of articles and informational pieces about your company’s industry that are posted on the web. Social media, e-newsletters, videos and blogs can also be used as part of a content marketing strategy.
The idea is to move from outbound marketing — such as TV or print ads — to inbound marketing, in which customers come to you because you’ve established yourself as an industry expert. Since inbound marketing produces leads at a lower cost than outbound marketing, it’s growing in popularity. In fact, one recent study showed that inbound marketing has a 61% percent lower cost per lead than outbound marketing.
How Does Content Marketing Work?
Sometimes a company will write and produce its own content. But just like any other marketing strategy, from ad creation to PPC management services, Internet marketing companies can provide nearly everything to build a strong content marketing strategy. All content types, from informational articles and blogs to press releases and news stories, can be researched and written offsite by professional writers and posted to the appropriate webpages with little or no effort on your part.
Why Does Content Marketing Work?
Content marketing is valuable because it is aimed both directly at your potential customers, by providing them with valuable content and positioning your company as the expert on a topic, and indirectly at potential customers through search engine optimization.
Content marketing works with SEO techniques both on and offsite. Offsite, using the correct keywords in content means that users are more likely to find articles and follow them back to your site, hopefully becoming customers. But since search engines also take into account how many links there are pointing to your website from other places on the web when deciding where to place your main website in search results, having content on other sites linking back to your site can boost your company in the rankings. The most important caveat for this strategy is understanding that search engines don’t simply count backlinks; instead, their algorithms try to determine the value and reliability of the sites hosting links that point to your webpage. If those links are on spam sites, your site will be penalized in search results, instead of elevated.
What Internet marketing strategies do you use? What has your success rate been? Share in the comments.
