American Express, one of the largest financial services companies in the world, has seen the future. They believe that traditional sales teams are slowly being made irrelevant as consumers become more content-driven. With more marketers focusing on content marketing than ever before, it’s starting to look like American Express was right on the mark. Content marketing is an enormous part of the present and future, and you need to take action now before it’s too late.
If you’re struggling with content marketing or haven’t gotten started with it yet, partnering with a marketing consultant is the best way to get started. They’ll be able to energize your campaign from the start, helping you create content that speaks to your audience and encourages immediate action.
Here are five important ways that the right marketing consultant will be able to help turn your Boston business by transforming you into a content marketing juggernaut:
Improve Your Marketing ROI
If your marketing budget is growing out of control and you’re not seeing enough returns, content marketing is perfect for you. Traditional advertising methods rack up costs quickly, especially if you’re paying for prime real estate on television, radio, or even Google.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is extremely cost effective. If you have the know-how, it doesn’t cost anything except your time to put together an informative blog. YouTube channels perform particularly well. A recent study from Google found that using YouTube channels to compliment a traditional television campaign tends to improve its ROI. The younger your target market is, the greater your results tend to be.
In fact, most marketing experts believe video content has the best ROI overall, whether it’s tied to a traditional television campaign or not. Since video is a bit more involved to produce than other types of content, pairing with an expert is imperative if you want to hit the ground running.
Get Your Message to Stick
If you want to educate your audience and or get a particularly important message to resonate with them, you need to find an effective way to deliver it. A strong content campaign is a great way to do just that.
It’s important to figure out exactly what types of content you’re going to use. The best types of ones that incorporate as little text as possible. That’s because people tend to not read very much of what you write. On average, people will read about 28% of what’s written on a website. In practice, the vast majority read much less than that, as the numbers are slightly skewed upward by the rare consumers that actually read every single word.
That means you should stick to more creative types of content, like infographics and videos, where design and execution are critical. The right marketing consultant will help you design and share creative campaigns that speak directly to your local Boston audience.
Content marketing makes sure your message hits right where it’s supposed to.
Build Trust With Your Audience
People trust advertisements less than ever. An incredible 92% of consumers trust prefer peer recommendations over company-branded information to make their purchasing decisions. Usually, the best way to drive recommendations is by simply doing a great job and asking for them. It’s an effective way to generate some free advertising, but it’s difficult to control. This makes building genuine trust in order to generate sales someone difficult.
With content marketing, however, you can take an active part in leveraging your existing goodwill. Here are some ways a content marketing consultant can help you actively showcase peer-to-peer recommendations:
- Creating case studies and whitepapers about specific issues you’ve faced, how you tackled them, and what results were achieved.
- Putting together a video series of customer interviews or recommendations and share them on your social media pages.
- Finding and sharing links of third-party reviews liberally.
- Encouraging your most loyal customers to post guest reviews on your blog by offering them an advance trial or sample of a particular product.
Keep Your Sales Funnel Full
Generating leads is one of your marketing campaign’s most important jobs. Without enough prospects sales eventually dry up and revenue stops flowing in. There are lots of different ways you can use content to start naturally generating leads:
- eBooks are a perfect carrot to offer your audience in exchange for their email, phone number or other vital information. As an added bonus, it can also help educate your audience and demonstrate your industry expertise.
- Webinars, whether they’re live or recorded, are another great piece you can offer your audience in order to encourage them to provide their personal information.
- Blogs, YouTube videos, and more can be tweaked and optimized for search engine optimization, allowing you to strategically target natural search traffic.
A content marketing consultant will not only be able to help you figure out what content will entice your audience the most, they’ll be able to help you create and distribute it.
Content marketing is the perfect way to increase traffic and find more leads.
Nurture Your Existing Leads
If you are actively nurturing your existing leads, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. Historical data shows that companies focused on lead nurturing are able to generate 50% more sales at one-third the cost. Content marketing can be used to both identify where your prospects are in the sales funnel and to actively nurture them.
One good way to use content marketing to segment your prospects is by creating content specifically for each stage. If for example, you have an eBook for brand-new prospects, existing prospects, and mature prospects, you can be sure of exactly where they stand in your process as soon as they download it. If you have a blog, you can track exactly what post they subscribed from and use that to decide where they can be slotted.
Once you have your list segmented properly, you need to create a campaign to properly nurture them. That’s where an experienced marketing consultant will really shine. They’ll be able to develop a content series that gives them the information they need to move forward in your funnel.
