Role of Content Marketing in Online Advertising (Website)

C ontent marketing is the art of creating useful, interesting content to engage your target audience, build your relationship with them, and tell your brand story. Per dollar spent, content marketing creates three times more leads than other traditional online advertising techniques, such as PPC.

When used in conjunction with SEO and social media, content marketing has the power to build a strong online presence for your business, strengthening and extending your online customer relationships.

Great content doesn’t have to be the written word. Visual content tends to be more shareable, so photos and videos have a strong role to play in your content marketing strategy, as do infographics, articles and blog posts.

A clever content marketer will be able to take the same story or research and create multiple content formats, to drive down the cost per piece of content. A good content marketing strategy uses a mixture of content formats, while keeping a consistent style and personality throughout.

Make Friends Not Sales

C ontent can be informative or entertaining, so long as it is engaging and does not read like an advertisement.

Content marketing isn’t about generating sales directly. Instead the goal is to build a community, your reputation, relationships, loyalty, all of which have the potential to generate sales leads.

Getting It Out There

H ow you distribute your content is just as important as what you use as content. Email, social media and PPC all have a role to play in getting your brand voice distributed online, as does contributing to relevant websites.

Driving Traffic

G reat content can draw traffic to your website from a number of sources. A snappy title, or hilarious image could spread rapidly across social media platforms, and drive viewers to your site to see the full story.

Content marketing has an important role to play in SEO. By carefully targeting content to address common search queries from your customers you can reach a new audience.

Additionally, search engines are increasingly looking for quality indicators such as the number of social media shares, comments, and time spent on a page, all of which can be boosted by high quality content.

While backlinks are no longer as influential on search engine rankings as they once were, they are still an important element in any SEO strategy. Engaging, useful content will generate their own natural links.

Content marketing can build brand awareness, customer engagement and reach new audiences, while complementing your business’ social media and SEO strategies.