2 ways that a content marketing agency could help you build brand awareness and market your product or service

Content marketing is a relatively new kid on the block when it comes to marketing strategies, but in fact, it has existed in other forms since the 1950s advertising boom. The work that a content marketing agency does forms an important part of the marketing mix for many brands who have longer term strategies for lead generation and conversion.

The basic premise of content marketing is that by producing content that informs, inspires and entertains the target audience, the relevant brand can establish itself as an industry authority. There are a number of benefits that can be derived from partnering with a content marketing agency. These are two of them:

Content marketing produces long-term benefits for digital search

Statistics show that the first few results on a results page of a search engine like Google gain the most clicks. Consumer behaviour over time has solidified this finding. As a result, an entirely new field of marketing has emerged within the last two decades to cater to the needs of companies who want to appear within the first few results when users search for specific keywords. This kind of marketing is called search engine optimisation (SEO) and content marketing agencies employ a range of different methods to use content as a way of earning brands their place amongst the most popular search results.

In the formative years of search engine optimisation, companies could get away with producing low-quality content in high volumes. Search engine crawlers would then recognise those keywords and index those pages, pushing them higher up on results pages. Over time however, Google’s algorithms have evolved to be able to make the distinction between low- and high-quality content. Today, brands can be severely penalised for creating duplicate content, content that doesn’t make sense in plain language or content that uses an excessive amount of keywords (a practice known as ‘keyword stuffing).

The job of content marketers therefore, is to produce content on behalf of their clients that adds real value to the lives of their brand’s target audiences. This has led to the rise in popularity of content that gives advice, offers quick tips, shows a user how to do something or provides expert insights on a specific topic.

Google’s extremely smart algorithms now reward brands for good-quality content by prioritising relevance over any other factor when ranking pages. As a result, content marketing, when done correctly can be highly effective in making your brand more recognisable and discoverable by the world’s most popular search engines.

Content marketing can help you generate and nurture leads

The ultimate goal of any marketer, particularly in the digital space, is to generate leads for their clients and convert those leads. Multiple methods and tried-and-tested theories on the best way to convert leads have led to the development of what is known as the marketing funnel.

While marketing funnels may differ from company to company according to their business and growth strategy, they all follow a basic structure, which begins with raising awareness. At this preliminary stage, content marketers focus on introducing your brand or product to the market and using the right mix of channels to build hype and get people talking about your brand. Once this objective has been achieved, marketers use content (such as blogs, whitepapers, videos, social media content, research pieces and opinion articles) to garner interest. At this phase in the marketing funnel, the main objective is to demonstrate that your brand offers a viable solution to your prospective clients’ problem. The next task is to convince your audience that they will be making the right decision by buying your product or service. This can be done by using content to demonstrate how the product works, to highlight previous client reviews and testimonials or to show how your product is able to bring about positive change. Finally, at conversion stage the focus shifts to giving customers a final ‘nudge’ in the right direction so that they ultimately opt to buy the product or service.

At each stage of this process, content can be used to communicate your brand’s message in a way that is engaging and sparks conversation. Speak to your marketing agency to explore ways in which you can produce content that converts leads into sales.

Eager to discover the benefits of content marketing? We are a marketing and advertising agency based in Perth and we’re ready to show you how effective good content can be as part of an integrated marketing strategy. Connect with us today, we’d love to meet you and learn more about your business.