Does Content Marketing Connect With Customers?

Does Content Marketing Connect With Customers?
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As a marketer, we have to wear lots of hats and this helps us see what strategies work well and which ones don’t work so well. If you’re a non-marketer CEO, business executive or business owner, you’re probably scratching your head sometimes wondering if your marketing is being executed using the right tactics. Sometimes what may seem like a wrong tactical initiative could actually be hitting the target perfectly based on its goal, method, and purpose.

As consumers continue to be bombarded with more and more digital advertising channels each year, marketers continually have to assess what is best for their brand. With the use and effectiveness of content marketing on the rise, maybe it’s time to change your strategy to include content marketing or more of it.

Not Sure About Content Marketing?

If you’re not sure about content marketing, here are a few stats published by DemandMetric to help you get started and onboard. Content Marketing if produced well, can in fact be quite effective in connecting with your customers, and we all know what that leads to.

  • 90% consumers find custom content useful
  • 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content
  • 80% of people appreciate learning about a company through content marketing
  • 78% of consumers perceive a relationship between themselves and a company using custom content
  • 70% of people would rather learn about a company through articles rather than an advertisement

There are some very important key messages to understand that are embedded within these statistics, and they all are critical for marketers to use to reach and connect with customers, which we all know helps to cut through the clutter of online and offline content. Remember, content is not paid media advertising. Knowing that, here are 5 tips for your marketing team to know and to integrate into how your content marketing is produced and how it connects with the customer. These are part of the goal, method, and purpose we talked about earlier.

  • Useful: Your content should tell a story without selling. Communicate how useful your product is to your customer so they can better understand the value of it and how it relates to their need.
  • Positive: Brands that are positive in how they present themselves are infectious.
  • Learning: Because 60% of customers search online and make a buying decision before they contact the company, this means they want to understand the product or company before they purchase. Creating content that helps them learn more is extremely helpful.
  • Perceive: Customer perception becomes reality in their mind. As a brand, you want to shape how your customer’s perceive the brand by creating content that tells a great story. Think about what you want your customers to think of when your business comes to mind, then produce content that helps elicit that feeling or emotion.
  • Articles: An article or blog written by your marketing team is one of the more powerful pieces of content. It can be re-purposed into social media posts, infographics, a video, podcast… whatever you can think of. Customers nowadays learn more about companies through articles than ever before. Articles also help your company rank higher in search as well.
“Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing per dollar spent, content marketing generates approximately 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing” -DemandMetric
“Content marketing is the only marketing left” –Seth Godin

Let’s go back to the question. Does content marketing connect with customers? In my opinion, the answer is yes, it does connect. Connecting is not being exposed to an audience. Connecting means your content is relevant to your customer, timely; helps solve their problems, educates them and also helps to motivate them to take action.

Find Scott on Twitter: @scmacfarland

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