The year of compelling content

Being able to consistently capture the attention of an increasingly sophisticated and discerning online audience is the goal of most digital marketers. While these goals may vary enormously, they almost always involve some aspect of generating attention and driving business toward a website or landing page.

One of the most effective methods of generating business is through the use of a content marketing campaign. It allows a company to differentiate itself from its competition and communicate with its target audience by providing insights and highly useful information. Content marketing does not involve hard-core sales strategies. Instead, it relies on great content to attract the attention of its targeted audience and motivate those audience members to take action.

Think about the process that makes you first go to a website and then take some action such as signing up for a newsletter. It could originate from a discussion on LinkedIn where one of the participants strongly recommends an article or from a post in Facebook or any other social media platform. You follow the link to the website and then read the article. If you like the article, you will look more closely at the website. If you like the website and its content and if the website offers a free newsletter or white paper, you”™re much more inclined to sign up for it.

There are no direct sales involved in this process, only great content. The better the content and the better it is targeted toward its market, the better the results. According to the Content Marketing Institute, B2C marketers emphasize mobile content and apps along with print newsletters and magazines to reach their audience, while B2B marketers utilize case studies, webinars and white papers as their primary content-marketing vehicles.

One of the most important aspects of these content-based, customer acquisition and retention campaigns is brand awareness. Branding is becoming an increasingly important part of online marketing. In fact, one of the major goals of almost 50 percent of all webinars relates to some aspect of branding. It is one of the reasons why many top marketers frequently present content-based webinars (that almost always include a Call to Action).

According to a 2013 CopyPress study, 62.2 percent of content marketers reported that the highest return on investment (ROI) was for featured articles followed by video (51.9 percent) and white papers (45.6 percent). Although video can be difficult and time consuming to create and edit, when done properly, it can dramatically improve results. Given the recent developments in video products and equipment, I believe this ROI percentage will dramatically rise within the next few years. According to a December 2012 study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, digital ad spending alone is expected to increase from $2.93 billion in 2012 to $8.04 billion by 2016 and a significant portion of this will involve video and images.

The most effective content marketing campaigns are the ones that utilize multiple tactics across several social media platforms. In general, and assuming your audience is properly targeted, the more people you can reach, the greater the response. Furthermore, if one tactic doesn”™t work, perhaps another method will elicit a stronger response. Repurposing great content across different platforms is a highly effective strategy that motivates people and drives them toward a website or landing page.

This year, 34.8 percent of marketing professionals listed content marketing as the most important marketing strategy surpassing social media, SEO and all other types of online marketing for the first time. By incorporating content marketing into a social media marketing campaign across multiple platforms, most companies will be able to improve their brand recognition and increase sales.

Bruce Newman is the president of wwWebevents.com, a division of The Productivity Institute L.L.C. in Carmel. He is a social media guru and a specialist on webinar creation and promotion. He can be reached at bnewman@prodinst.com.