What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.
Understanding content marketing and how it can help grow your business is a critical step in leveraging the power of Inbound Marketing.
To begin, you need to understand the buying cycle. There are the stages a customer goes through before deciding to purchase your product or service.
4 Stages of the Customer Buying Cycle:
- Awareness: customer identification of a need and the realization that your online business can potentially fulfill it
- Consideration: customer evaluation of how your offering meets this need, including the evaluation of offerings from other e-commerce sites
- Preference/Intent: a customer’s logical and emotional inclination towards one solution or another, ultimately leading to a purchasing decision
- Purchase: The action of ordering and buying
If you’d like to develop a content marketing strategy to help bolster your business, you must first define your target audience and their needs. Think of who your business is targeting, what sort of information they’re typically after and how you could provide useful content to fill those needs.
Each stage of the buying cycle has a different need and therefore a different set of information that will speak to them. Tailor your content to the needs at each stage of the buying cycle.
The #1 Secret of Content Marketing. Add value. Not a big secret – we’ve discussed this before but it is surprisingly difficult to do. If you’re not sure how you can add value through content marketing, ask your existing customers what kind of content you can produce that would be helpful to them now or would have been helpful to them when they were looking for your product or service. They’ll tell you.
Be certain to stay true to your Brand and focus on subjects that speak to your target audience.
We Can Help
3D Studios helps businesses grow their influence and their brands. As a boutique brand management agency, we begin with a thorough analysis of your needs and partner with you to develop and execute a marketing plan that will help you take your business to the next level. To learn more about how 3D Studios can help you, visit us at www.3Dstudios.net or call 914-304-4229.
