How Content Marketing Can Improve Your Sales
One of the best things about content marketing is its ability to reach people in a different way than traditional marketing. Whether it’s through a personal touch, an educational or entertaining story, or more, content marketing focuses on providing valuable and relevant content to the customer alongside brand promotion. It’s a subtler, less overt way to promote a product or product line. Whatever the philosophy behind it, however, marketing needs to create revenue.
Let’s explore some of the ways that video content marketing can improve sales.
Brand Awareness + Engagement = Trust
Traci Warga identifies several profitable actions that result from content marketing. The first of them, that content marketing “creates brand awareness,” happens with traditional marketing as well. The difference is that content marketing does that and more, creating interest, engagement, and hopefully trust. Any mention of a brand will create awareness. But mentioning a brand inside a content marketing material will do so in a more positive way.
More awareness, especially coupled with positive feelings for the brand, consistently improves sales.
Educate Your Customers
Content marketing also improves sales by educating prospective customers. Your video can spend most of its runtime explaining a concern or opportunity. Then you avoid the hard sell by simply showing the customer what they need or could use.
Education also builds trust (and therefore, more visits to your site and more probable conversions) as it’s a gift to your viewers. They may not be interested in your product or service right now. But the free lesson you taught them will stick with them. They’ll remember your brand’s content marketing. When they do need a product that you sell, you’ll be at the top of their minds.
Drive Qualified Traffic to Your Website
Besides creating brand awareness and the benefits of educational content marketing, all content marketing has the ability to drive traffic to your website. This is particularly true when you carefully tag your content marketing for optimal search engine results. With SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and strong content, you’ll see more qualified traffic. That is, visitors that are highly likely to become paying customers.
Tutorials and Guides Keep Your Product Front and Center
Another great way content marketing can drive sales is through the use of tutorial guides or videos. If you explain your product or service through an interesting, engaging video or guide, you’re able to enjoy the benefits of both traditional and content marketing. By that, I mean you’ll be making great content that will drive interest in your product (the engaging tutorial) and letting the product remain front and center. With the product front of mind, this approach requires particularly entertaining or otherwise standout content to avoid the pitfalls of overt promotion.
Consider making the story outrageous, including fantastic visual effects, or writing in a lot of jokes. As long as your content is relevant and engaging enough, you’ll reap the rewards of content marketing. Even with your product or service in the spotlight.
Build Relationships Over Time
Frequently updated content marketing can build relationships with the potential customers that encounter it, and improve sales through these relationships. The more content marketing that you publish, the more prospective customers see you as more than a business.
They’ll repeatedly check your website, social media, or wherever you publish your content marketing. This provides continued exposure to your product. If your content is strong enough and consistent enough to get viewers to trust and enjoy your brand, it’s only a matter of time until that trust applies to your product line—and you’re enjoying the sales.
Create Content that Lasts
Creating content marketing that has evergreen appeal will also drive up sales, especially when created with SEO in mind. Evergreen content is content that is consistently reviewable, and continually drives even people who have already experienced it to take another look. This kind of content will simultaneously “…attract new readers, would-be customers, and convert visitors to leads and paying customers.”
Target the right keywords with your evergreen content, and it’ll come up in search engines alongside the type of product customers are looking for. Get their eyes in front of strong evergreen content marketing in the midst of searching for your kind of product, and you can almost guarantee an increase in sales.
Listen to What Your Customers Have to Say
There’s another kind of content marketing that often gets forgotten in all the discussion of strong infographics and videos.
Discussion forums.
When a brand has an active presence in discussion forums and communities, it can drive up sales by making the brand feel even more humanized and trustworthy.
The ‘humanizing’ factor isn’t just relevant because there’s a human responding to comments and feedback; being a part of discussions and online communities allows a company to express its values and define itself publicly. Many mission statements and value affirmations happen internally, and are highly beneficial for internal unity and cohesion. Expressing these values externally can create higher trust and engagement.
A last point on discussions as a form of content marketing: An unreachable brand doesn’t feel like it cares about its customers, so go the other way and prove you care by being a part of the conversations your customers are having. On top of the personality it gives your brand, it’ll give you more visibility, which inevitably improves sales.
Demographics Matter
Finally, there’s a demographic-specific bonus to content marketing when it comes to sales. If you’re targeting Millennials (or Generation Y, if you prefer; the relevant age range here is 25-39), you’re reaching them best with content marketing. That’s 79 million people, spending an average of $170 billion per year in the US alone—not exactly a minor segment of the population.
Why is content marketing able to get Millennials to buy?
It comes with the power of recommendations, which Millennials rely heavily upon: 70% reported their decision to buy something because of a friend or family member’s recommendation, or because of a post online. This means that when your content marketing is recommendation-worthy and posted online, your chance at securing a Millennial purchase is extremely high.
It’s also worth specifying that the online post, 70% of the time, was designated as a non-advertisement. That means it was content marketing, and that’s why its effectiveness is trumpeted in Millennial conversions.
Key Takeaways
Content marketing can improve sales for a variety of reasons, in several different ways. Whether creating brand awareness happens through education, tutorials, relationship-building, or participation in online discussion, high brand awareness leads to higher traffic to your website and more engagement with your brand. Evergreen content, in particular, creates high traffic, and can lead directly to converting visitors to customers. This is particularly true of Millennials, a large group with considerable spending power who greatly prefer content marketing to traditional marketing.
Take advantage of content marketing, and improve your sales with content that drives interest in your brand. It’s an increasingly popular style of marketing, and it’s highly likely to drive up your sales numbers.