Among online marketers there is a well-known expression, “Content is king” which in Indonesian is translated as, “Content is king.” Some may wonder why content is so important that it is called “king”?
Content is very important in the world of online marketing. Content is anything that can convey a message to the audience.
Without content, both social media marketing and SEO efforts, will not produce any results. Just imagine, you just create a business account on Facebook or Instagram without releasing content regularly.
Of course, the business account becomes useless. Likewise with a website or business blog. Websites or blogs that are never updated with content will also not produce any results in your business.
What is Content Marketing?
After understanding what content is, what I will discuss next is content marketing. The definition of content marketing is quite simple.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a marketing technique that involves creating and distributing relevant, important, and consistent content to attract audiences with the aim of converting them into consumers.
There are two important elements in content marketing. First, content must meet these three conditions: important, relevant, and consistent.
So, you can’t be careless in creating content for content marketing. Content must meet the three conditions above.
You must create content that is relevant to your business. For example, you run a fashion business. Then you need to create content related to fashion.
Relevance alone is not enough. You also need to consider whether the content is important or not for the target audience to know.
Make a priority scale containing topics that are relevant to the target audience. Sort from most important to least important.
The last requirement is consistency. In content marketing, you can’t rely on just one piece of content to attract the attention of the audience.
It takes a lot of content for you to finally experience the benefits of content marketing for your business.
The second element in content marketing is achieving the goal of converting audiences into consumers.
Keep in mind that producing content for content marketing is not just to entertain the audience.
There is a goal that you must achieve, which is to convert your audience into customers.
So after consuming the content that you create, the audience is moved to buy the product or service that you are selling.
Forms of Content Marketing
There are many forms of content marketing. Here are some of the most used forms of content marketing.
Blog
Blogs are the most fundamental and most important form of content marketing. This platform is fundamental to content marketing not without reason.
Blogs allow you to share ideas and complete information in one article. In addition, blog content is a long-term investment because the level of resilience of blog content is the highest compared to other types of content.
According to research conducted by the Social Media Online Class, blog content can last up to two years.
Ebook
Sometimes you need a longer medium than blog articles, you can use ebooks. Ebooks are also a form of content marketing that you can rely on.
You can make conditions to be able to download your ebook, people must enter an email first.
So you can get leads through ebooks which you can then convert into consumers in the future.
Video
Video is also one type of content that you need to pay attention to for content marketing. Because video marketing can make your visitors spend more time on the blog.
The more time a visitor spends on the blog, the better the score on Google. According to iMPACT research, videos increase organic traffic by 157 percent.
Email is also a popular form of content marketing. The effectiveness of email for marketing purposes is fairly high, which is 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter.
There are various forms of content in email marketing. From promotional emails, shopping cart reminder emails, newsletters, to ebook promotions.
Social media
Social media is also part of content marketing. However, because the discussion of marketing on social media is too broad, social media has its own branch in the world of marketing, namely social media marketing.
Why is Content Marketing Important for Business?
Actually, content marketing is not a new technique, it’s just that in Indonesia the popularity of the term content marketing is still low.
Abroad, content marketing techniques have been massively applied by various large companies such as Buffer, Hubspot, and Rip Curl.
The application of content marketing is not without reason. Of course, if a marketing technique has proven its effectiveness, more and more people will apply it.
Here are six reasons why content marketing is widely used by large companies and why you need to apply it to your business as well:
1. Long Term Investment
In contrast to ads or advertisements, content marketing can last for a longer period of time.
If ads only run for a certain period of time, content marketing can last for years as long as the content you create is still relevant. You can also update the content to adapt it to trends.
2. Increase Brand Awareness
Producing content means giving the audience a topic to talk about. For example, Niagahoster recently created blog content about how to create a website.
When any of your friends ask you how to make a website, you can share the Niagahoster blog link. Of course, learning to make a website is not enough just to use one article.
In addition to the articles you share, your friends will also be looking for other articles related to creating a website on the Niagahoster blog.
3. Gain Customer Trust
Customer trust doesn’t just come. You need to build customer trust. One way is to use content marketing. Before making a choice in buying a product, customers usually do an online research first.
With content marketing, you can convince your customers. Consumers will find quality content that you create when they enter your business name in search engines.
4. Increase Traffic
Traffic is the most tangible benefit of content marketing. Creating great content will get people to visit your website.
On the website, visitors can get complete information about the products or services that you offer.
5. Improve SEO Quality
Content is the spearhead of SEO. By producing great content, you can get people to refer your content.
That way Google will assess your website as an important and trusted website. In addition, Google will also crawl your website.
This is beneficial for you because Google becomes more aware of your business so Google will refer to your website more often for relevant keywords.
However, make sure you create content anyway for humans and not for search engines. In other words, the content you create remains easy to read and doesn’t appear to be manipulated.
There are many techniques to manipulate content, one of which is keyword stuffing.
6. Customer Conversion
In the previous point, it was explained that content marketing can bring in large amounts of traffic.
The good news is that the benefits of content marketing don’t stop there. In addition to bringing in traffic, content marketing can also function to convert visitors into customers.
Conclusion
Thus an explanation of the definition of content marketing along with its forms and benefits.
Content marketing is today’s marketing technique that every business owner needs to implement.
This marketing technique not only has high effectiveness to attract consumers but also can last for a long period of time.
To become a reliable content creator, you need to master various skills related to content creation.
This article only discusses a small part of content marketing. In the next article, I will discuss the right strategy for creating effective content marketing for your business.
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