Content marketing is all the rage today because of the surge in online businesses. In this day and age, companies of all sizes and types rely on content marketing to survive and thrive, unlike in the early days when traditional marketing was the norm. If you want to start a business or a personal brand, there has never been a better time to do so.
However, you need to invest time and money in content marketing and its various components – social media marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), building email lists, and so on. In this article, we shall discuss the fundamentals of content marketing and email lists.
What do you need to know about Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating, strategizing, publishing, and distributing content to your target audience to boost your brand’s visibility. You probably know by now that content marketing is important. But, here’s why it is essential:
It helps you educate and inform your audience
There are millions of businesses online, which means you have a lot of competition. With the sheer amount of choice consumers have, you need to be able to stand out to make an impact. Content marketing helps you accomplish this. You can educate your target audience via video tutorials, blog posts, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram posts, and so on. The key to standing out is providing valuable information and doing it consistently.
Establish trust with your audience
This point ties into the first one. Putting out valuable content enables you to forge a relationship with your audience. Aside from posting content, you will have to engage with your audience by replying to comments, answering questions, handling complaints and issues, asking questions, requesting feedback, etc. The added advantage to doing this is that you can spruce up your content with the feedback you get.
Compensate for the lack of a marketing budget
The early marketing models required that businesses have massive budgets to run effective campaigns. You would have to spend substantial amounts of money to place an advertisement on TV, radio, and the newspaper to get some mileage. Most smaller businesses could not afford to do this. However, with the advent of content marketing, you can compensate for the lack of a massive budget by putting out content.
While marketing campaigns can drive traffic, it is temporary. However, stellar content can fetch you leads for a long time, without having to put in any money. In other words, content marketing is a high Return on Investment (ROI).
Expand your brand with ease
Unlike conventional marketing methods, content marketing focuses on brand expansion on multiple platforms. You can reach target audiences on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP), YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc. However, repurposing and optimizing your content for each of these platforms is different. To make the best of this, be sure to cross-promote your brand by sharing your content on all your platforms.
What do you need to know about Email Lists?
Email marketing is another area you need to concern yourself with, whether you are a small business or a well-established business with a plethora of clients. If you are a bigger business, you may need to find out the time to build an email list for one thousand business professionals.
Email lists are lists of email addresses that you retrieve from prospects and clients who want to be kept up-to-date on your brand. You can do so by sending them brand-related updates using an email marketing service. Email marketing has several advantages to its credit:
Make communication with prospects personal
Email lists allow you to have personalized communication with your clients or prospects, which is critical in this day and age. Traditional marketing does not seem to be working any more. Instead of spamming your prospects with ads, you can create content that you think will benefit them and forge a relationship with them, thus increasing your chances of converting them into loyal customers. Moreover, email marketing services and tools make every step of your campaign from email search to personalization much easier.
Visitor and customer retention becomes easy
Your content marketing game might be on point. You may be putting out tons of content on social media and have an effective SEO strategy. Your website may work flawlessly and have visitors interested. However, they have a lot of choice, which means they may forget to return to your site unless you really make an impact. Using email marketing to remind them to see what you have going on is an excellent way to get them to revisit your site and buy your products.
How to create an email list?
There are tons of advantages of having an email list. But how do you create one? Here’s how:
Find your niche
This step precedes every other action you take whether you want to build an email list or put out content. Once you determine your target audience, you will know what you have to offer them and how they will benefit from it.
Have an active website or landing page
Boosting traffic is no use if you do not have a website for people to visit. If you do not have a working website, set up a landing page at the very least. The landing page must have an opt-in form for visitors to enter their email addresses.
Give them a reason to subscribe
Tell them why they should give you their email addresses at the risk of getting spammed. Your audience needs to benefit from this, which means you should have already provided them with valuable content, and are now offering an incentive such as a free ebook, free training session, bonus footage, coupons, discount, and so forth.
Conclusion
As mentioned earlier, content marketing can build your brand from scratch. If you are into content-related events like Content Marketing World, you can look for the director of content marketing in Cleveland. Remember to post as much content as possible and make sure that your audience benefits from it.
