If you’ve been doing online marketing in any form, you’ve probably heard the word “content marketing” thrown around recently.
There are marketers who swear by it, and numerous success stories on how content marketing is the new face of advertising and generating new customers.
As savvy marketers ourselves, we thought we’d test the power of content marketing ourselves – and we have to say, we agree!
Content marketing has the power to attract new customers at a much higher level than regular advertising – it captures people on their interests and sells to them when they are at their highest level of engagement, thus generating a higher number of qualified leads than advertising offers directly.
Let’s look at real time results from content marketing
We created a campaign for our client where they had an offer worth AED 1,999
The first ad was a direct ad promoting the offer on Facebook
The second ad was promoting a blog post (i.e: content) on the topic of the same service that the offer was on
Once taken to the content/blog page, the offer was prompted to the reader at the end of the blog post, which then took them to the offer page where they could book (this is the same page that the first ad took them to directly)
So what did we find after creating these 2 ads?
The second ad where we used the strategy of content marketing outperformed the direct offer ad by a distinguished amount – 10:1
So yes, it definitely works!
Apart from just increasing conversions & customer bookings, research shows that content marketing has a host of other benefits. Here are some stats of companies using content marketing strategy:
55% more web visitors
97% more inbound links
434% more indexed pages by search engines
However, it’s important to remember that content marketing will only work when you create useful content that will answer any objections or questions your potential customer might have regarding what you are offering them.
The content should be interesting, relevant and engaging. In fact, posting junk or irrelevant content is a sure fire way to seriously harm your online marketing efforts.
There are a number of ways to create the content through which you are going to market, the easiest (and generally the most effective) being blogging.