Guest Column: Nine ways to drive sales from content marketing

Content marketing is a strategy to create, curate and amplify content for building advocacy and thought leadership which can directly result in achieving business & marketing objectives by influencing a set target audience. 

In the era of digital marketing, content marketing has become omnipresent. With growing cognizance among consumers and expectation of quality content from brands, content marketing has become the centrepiece of most marketers’ marketing efforts. 

However, there is a growing concern over the feasibility of content marketing costs. A number of times marketers wonder if it is worth the hype. To answer this question correctly, it should be highlighted that content marketing is a long-haul strategy that is targeted at an intended audience in the most effective and efficient approach. Hence, it has become one of the most cost-efficient marketing strategies of this century. Moreover, content marketing provides maximum return on investment with minimum efforts and resources. Content marketing is not just a brand awareness strategy, but can also be deployed to generate sizable leads for any company. Content marketing strategies are data driven, creative and measurable, hence give a brand the biggest bang for their buck. 

Best content marketing practices put a brand’s name in front of potential customers attracting them towards the brand and making them a possible lead for you. Every business’ ultimate goal is to drive more sales, and content marketing does that job in an efficient, structured and effective manner. 

You can go through some tips that can help you generate sales from content marketing: 

Decode Buyer’s Persona
Quality content is not always helpful in attracting consumers and winning their trust, but understanding the buyer’s persona and mindset using the right set of tools and content can help brands to develop an effective content marketing strategy. Corporates must know what are their target audience’s choices and preferences and focus on providing the content similar to that interest. Doing so helps in creating better chances of generating leads. 

Educate Your Customers
When a brand lays out more educational content for their readers, they build an absolute authority in that space. Educational content can help a brand establish itself as a thought leader in their domain, which ultimately helps them to build a trust factor in the industry. Therefore, developing a voice of faith in a particular area helps a brand to have an edge and helps it to engage larger audience ultimately generating more potential leads for them. 

Make best use of user generated content

 User-generated content (UGC) is vital for every marketer today. As a brand grows, it develops a reputation and receives feedbacks from consumers, both positive and adverse. These feedbacks are critical for the growth of any company as these feedbacks and reviews reflect the perception your brand has been able to create. You can use the positive feedbacks as testimonials and use them further for building your image, whereas the adverse feedbacks can help you look deeper into the cracks or disconnect between the brand’s services and consumer’s expectations. 

Customise Your Content
Social media platforms are the new hoardings for advertisements and banners. Social media provides a platform to companies where they can reach out and interact directly with their consumers. But it is equally important to understand the orientation of a particular platform to market the product effectively. For instance, Instagram is a more image-friendly platform and will get more attention when a brand uses attractive images or videos. Therefore, to utilise the complete potential of social media platforms, brands must understand the type of content that is consumed the most on that platform. 

Explore New Content Formats
Just creating a blog or writing content pieces and publishing them on a brand’s website isn’t enough anymore. With increasing competition, there is a need to move ahead of just words. Visual media such as GIFs, videos, images, infographics and many others are the new things in the market. Focusing on newer social mediums like Snapchat, Periscope, etc., and creating content pieces like a whitepaper or ebook helps brands in promoting themselves in a subtle way than just pushing out digital banner ads. 

CTAs Are Equally Important
Call-To-Action (CTA) work as a performing click bait to convert your readers to potential leads. Every piece of content you publish must fulfil its purpose and bring some leads for your business. Including CTAs in your content adroitly makes it possible for a user to trace back the service to your site and subscribe to your newsletters/ blogs that can further become leads for your company. 

Use Automation
It is possible for a sales professional to miss out on a potential lead because of some reasons which can result in a loss of business. Marketing automation tools help a marketing professional to keep track of such potential leads and keep your brand a step ahead. Look at inbound marketing tools like HubSpot that can execute tasks like lead generation, mapping social engagement among other. There are various content marketing tools to achieve automation and measuring the results. 

First Impression Is The best
The saying stands true even in today’s digital era. If you can impress your consumer with a first look, then half your work is done. People look for quality and don’t have time to waste on boring stuff. Your content must be captivating, have quality graphics and have engaging copy. This is why visual content is gaining popularity and being used by marketers more. 

Go Old School
With growing competition online, where every brand is trying to attract customers, getting attention can become a daunting task. In cases like these, brands shouldn’t shy away from adopting old school marketing tactics. Old school methods can at times benefit brands more than the digital marketing practices, for example, sending greeting cards to existing customers or a thank-you note to former customers to win back the trust and in the process attracting them back to your brand. 

A number of companies were initially hesitant to adopt content marketing, with a constant fear lurking that it would provide a minimal return on investment, despite the amount of efforts involved. However, content undoubtedly remains the king of modern marketing, and any company that does not have a content strategy is likely to be missing out and need to be pull up their socks to adapt with changing dynamics of the industry. 

(Honey Singh is Co-Founder and CEO - PR & Content Marketing at #ARM Worldwide.)