How Is Content Marketing Different from Traditional Marketing
For any business, no matter the industry, the goal of marketing is to drive potential customers to action, whether that means buying a new product or utilizing a service that your company offers. While past marketing practices only offered limited platforms, such as billboards or cold calling, many businesses are seeing a great deal of success with content marketing.
What Is Traditional Marketing?
This type of marketing refers to the lack of permission from the target audience. Some examples would be print ads, television ads, radio ads, product and service brochures, cold calling, Television commercials, and other types of direct marketing advertisements; all of which are geared towards traditional marketing campaigns. Typically, these marketing advertisements are used to reach a wide audience and are done so in a way that the target audience is directly sought out. Essentially, no permission is granted with these type of traditional marketing strategies. Even when it comes to b2b marketing, there is no allowance for the line of communication to be made.
We see traditional marketing through traditional advertising all the time. The advertisements that come up when we are using a phone app, the billboards we see along our commute, and so on. This type of marketing isn’t necessarily wrong, but it is certainly different than content marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
This type of marketing, on the other hand, is all about permission. The primary goal of content marketing, often known as inbound marketing, is to engage with the audience, which does ultimately lead to both customer retention and potential sales. Type of content marketing might include articles and blogs, infographics, marketing emails, podcasts, newsletters, quizzes, and so forth. Essentially, anything that acts as a platform for information, whether informative or entertaining, would be considered content marketing.
Thus, if you have asked yourself why you should use email marketing which is a subset of content marketing or how to use social media effectively, then it is important to know what content does in both regards. Specifically, because of the additional value that the customer places on information.
This is a large part of how content marketing is different from traditional marketing - the way that clients are obtained are entirely different.
Why You Need Content Marketing for Your Business
Consider the way that you interact with brands that you love and why. If you are like me, then you find value in articles, explanation videos, and so forth. All of these bring some type of usefulness and are more likely to get me engaged than seeing an advertisement or getting a cold call. Thus, if you are also wondering how to convert cold leads into sales, this would be one angle to utilize.
Your customers are the exact same way. By providing your customers value, they are more likely to engage with your brand. Thus, if you now question how to generate leads with content marketing, it goes back to the idea of information and what value your customers will place on it.
Content marketing works well because it is:
Long-lasting. New audiences can stumble on an article, for example, and still engage with it.
Easily Shared. Your target audience is more likely to share content with others than an advertisement.
Scalable. You can use content in a variety of different ways, reusing it, as well as parsing it out for a particular niche audience.
Creates Loyalty. Your audience will respect you and the information you provide.
Need to create content marketing for your business? Want your marketing efforts to better pay off? We can help!
