Why content is the heart of Digital Marketing?

Can you recall the last time when someone marketed a product/service to you?

Can’t think. Think again.

If you still can’t think, let me rephrase the question.

What was the last information or content that you have seen or read?

The answers to this could be videos, articles, newspapers, news, infographics, blogs and so on.

Content is everywhere!

And knowing or unknowingly we are consuming content that is a part of someone’s marketing effort!

Surprised? But it’s true!

Table of Contents

“Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing” – Rebecca Lieb

News, advertisements, sales copy, books, podcasts, emails, videos, infographics – all these are different forms of the content presented through different mediums and channels. Every single source of information that we consume every day mindfully or unconsciously is nothing but content and is a part of a marketing strategy that is used to educate and inform the audience.

Signages, billboards, overhead banners are also different forms of contents. These contents are presented to us in different forms by people trying to inform and educate us about their brand and services/ products offered by them.

But how can we prove that Content is the heart of Modern Digital Marketing?

You must have thought digital marketing is all about SEO, Facebook ads and google ads run for making sales.

But if you delve deep down, you will start to gain insight into this question.

Content helps us to communicate, connect and build trust with our target audience. Using well-written quality content, we can communicate, convey and convince our audience about our offerings and help them throughout their customer journey with us.

If you are responsible for taking care of the marketing efforts of your company or for your clients, you will know the importance of using the right marketing mix to get the message delivered to your target audience and the role that quality content plays in it.

Marketing in the online platform coupled with different strategies such as emails, social media, web-based advertising, texts and multimedia messages, we can expand our market reach and penetrate the niche market easily.

With digital marketing, it is easy to reach potential customers, convey your offerings, address their needs and convince them about their purchase of product/service with you.

Point to Remember!

With digital marketing, it’s just the platform of marketing that has changed to digital. However, the core concepts of traditional marketing have always remained the same. Since the ultimate goal of digital marketing is to make a sale, one must know and remember the laws of marketing. It’s also important to remember that the transaction still involves purchase and sales between human beings and the psychology of customer perceived value plays an important role in the marketing.

Fundamentals of Marketing

Selling on the digital platform is not just pushing the target audience to buy the products. Instead, it’s important to build your reputation and trust among the masses over some time. You may call it “Mass Trust” but this is very important in the long term, as the mass trust gained can work in your favour and help you spread the word of mouth.

The Role of Communication in Marketing?

“A brand is worthless if it doesn’t connect with the right audiences in a relevant way.” – Cory Torrella

Harsh but true.

What is the point of creating a brand and trying to sell products, when you are not able to reach your target audience and tell them what you are selling?

Defining your Target Audience

It is also worth noticing that thoroughly defining your target audience is important because that sets your foundation for identifying buyer behaviour. What type of information does your audience like to watch, their online and offline behaviour, their purchase power, their barriers to purchase and many other questions can be answered when you know your audience well.

Only when you know your target customer well, know where or on which platform they are dwelling and what specific times most of your audience is online, you will be able to show up in front of them.

One must understand that marketing effort is all about effective communication and that is why the content is the heart of the marketing. It’s though communication that we try to inform and educate our customers about our product/service offerings and how we are different from others competing in the market.

You may choose to communicate in any language or using any form of communication, including email, messaging services, blogs or social media, but it’s important to communicate effectively and convey your message clearly.

The subject of your message should be immediately identified by your audience and you must be able to hold their attention for long enough to convey the complete message.

Brand recall or recognition is a great result of clear communication as it results in the audience identifying your brand based on past communication and able to select your service over others when in need.

So, each time you are writing content/ad copy for any marketing campaigns, write them for your target audience to communicate with them about your offerings.

How is Digital Marketing different from Traditional marketing?

While both digital and traditional marketing has its advantages and disadvantages, let us try to weigh them using a simple table below.

People with purchasing power is now using some digital platform. It is easy to increase your reach to your potential customers, market to them and measure the effectiveness of your marketing in real-time using analytics.

Building Brands

In marketing, building a strong brand is about creating a perceived value for the audience.

How to build a strong brand?

Begin with selecting a niche. Your niche is an area where your strength and knowledge lie and there is also a market for selling your products/services.

Several factors that affect the niche selection. It could be a conjunction of passion, knowledge and market presence.

To build a strong brand, find your niche and be a market leader for that niche. Since people can remember and recall only the leader or the top two players in the brand, it sometimes could be difficult to rank high to be the market leader.

In such a case, you may focus on being the leader in the sub-domain.

If you are an online marketer selling Fashion and Home Décor items, you may want to deal with variety of items in this segment. While at the beginning as a new entrant, it may not be possible to establish oneself as a leader in such a wide segment, it is definitely possible to use the right digital channels and the marketing funnel to establish as a leader in a sub-segment, like dealing with home decor items under Rs. 1000/- only. Now that way, you are trying to establish yourself as a name in this segment, so anyone willing to purchase home décor items should remember your offerings and look at you for products.

Thereafter, more opportunities for expansion may be looked at to expand into other areas of business as well.

How to succeed with your digital marketing efforts?

If you have been thinking that outsourcing your digital marketing needs, and running ads on different channels can increase the sales, then you need to think deeply about it. Your digital marketing is not just about posting content on social media websites, or optimizing the website for search engines or just sending out emails to hundreds and thousands of customers and hoping they will buy something from you.

To be successful in digital sales, its important to integrate the digital marketing efforts and place a framework in place so each part of digital marketing strategy can fit in seamlessly within the structure.

It is also important to look at components in the digital marketing framework as small but very important parts which when placed together can complete the jigsaw puzzle.

Consider the following as the important areas of the digital marketing:

1. Using Content – as a part of Content marketing

2. Email communication – as Email Marketing

3. On-page optimization – as SEO Management

4. Social media – using Social Media Marketing

5. Increasing the visibility of the adverts on Google search or social media – using Paid Advertisements

6. Selling the products – and converting the Prospects to Buyers

Creating personal branding

Personal branding is a way to let the world identify the image behind the services / products sold. It helps people build trust and connect to, before they purchase the services.

When one is popular and known as a leader in their niche, they become the influencer and the brand ambassador of the brand they are running.

In future, if they establish new business ventures, it is very easy for them to reach out to the prospects as they already have a huge fan following. Since the trust is already built in the followers, the conversion takes less effort and time.

Here are some examples of successful brands:

1. Michelle Obama: She has built a successful brand based on education, health, and support for feminist causes and racial discrimination

2. Tim Ferriss: He has been able to successfully create a brand based on productivity, time management, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. He has sold over million copies of well-known book The 4 Hour Work Week and receives more than 2.4 million visitors per month.

3. Oprah Gail Winfrey: An American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She has established herself as a brand by challenging people to be a better version of themselves by reaching their full potential.

Personal branding is a process that begins with learning about your niche. Using these steps, you will create MassTrust among your followers and emerge as a Strong Personal Brand. Learn more about Personal Branding here.

Step1: Learn – Begin with learning the basic concepts and fundamentals, the facts and figures and the How To’s of doing the task or new task involved.

Step 2: Work – Then it’s time to implement the learning and gain experience. During implementation, you will face new challenges and learn more while practically doing it, thus strengthening your learning.

Step 3: Blog – After you have executed and deployed several successful projects, it’s time to pen down your experiences and learnings as a blog post and share them with others to inspire them. This will help in reconciling the knowledge gained in the past two phases of learning. While well-written quality content can help educate others, it can bring enormous benefits, including building trust and personal branding.

Step 4: Consult – Having gone through the first three stages of development and spent enough time in gaining experience, you can then consult other businesses and provide them with invaluable suggestions that you have gained. You can then trade your time for consulting others.

Step 5: Mentor – Having gained enough experience as a consultant, you are now ready to exponentially expand and spread your learning with like-minded people who are inspired by you and would like to gain knowledge to establish themselves in the same field.

Step6: Startup – Having gone through stages of learning and development, you can set up your agency or startup in a niche that you are interested in if you have the right skills and there is market demand.

Learn –> Work –> Blog –> Consult –> Mentor –> Startup

CATT MARKETING FUNNEL

Gain Trust in your niche

Digital marketers and businesses face difficulties in gaining followers and the trust of their target audience. Following the strategies below to create a marketing funnel can focus on the activities and streamline the efforts.

The wealth you intend to create is a result of a niche that you will select and it grows exponentially with the Contents you write, attention that you can grab, trust that you win and transactions that take place.

As the popular quote goes “Building wealth is a marathon, not a sprint!” – Dave Ramsey

Here is a popular formula for creating wealth that has all the vital components. When executed well, it will help you create the amount of wealth you would like.

Wealth = n^CATT

Let’s look at it in detail.

The CATT marketing funnel is a cyclic process, where you move through different stages one at a time. Spend enough time at each stage doing the activities to get the results.

Niche:

Your ideal niche is an area where you have immense talent.

How to Select a Niche?

Consider getting into a segment that you are passionate about, but you don’t have skills or talent. How would you be able to provide services to others in such an area?

Alternatively, if you have skills and knowledge in a particular area but don’t have the interest or passion, you won’t be able to do that work for a long time due to lack of interest.

It’s ideal to select an area of your interest and have the right skills.

But wait!

Have you thought about the market demand for that product or service? If you have both passion and skills to service the customers, but there isn’t much demand for that service/product, it would be difficult to make sales in that area.

So going back to our question, “How to Select a niche?”, it would be ideal to select an area that you are passionate about, have skills/talent in the area, and that has market demand. This ensures that you can reach and educate customers, build trust and make sales.

Content:

The CATT marketing funnel explains, “Why Content is the heart of modern digital marketing?”. It is easy to understand that the content is the game-changer.

Create and offer Quality content for your niche and spread that through various channels to reach your target audience. Social media channels, blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, live webinars and others are some popular form of contents.

Attention:

Marketers have always faced difficulty to grab the audience attention. With a reduced attention span of the audience, it’s important to create content that can grab the attention quickly and rewards them for consuming the content.

You can use different methods to show up in front of your customers on different platforms using SEO, Paid Ads, Social media and referrals for lead generation.

Trust:

“You don’t build a business, you build people and then those people build the business” – Zig Ziglar

In marketing, you need to give your target audience more than one chance through your marketing efforts to trust you. When you target their pains and provide the solution, when you present the answers to their questions and when you solve their problems, they start trusting your expertise and provide you with a chance to service them.

There are many ways that you can build trust with your target audience.

1. Identifying yourself to be a leader/master in your field: 

Your target audience is more likely to respond to your marketing efforts if you can help them out of your way. If you help them with an answer to a problem, they will not only thank you for the solution but also look at you next time they have a similar problem. This process is iterative and it does not take too many attempts before someone decides if they need to believe you as a leader in that field.

2. Creating tripwires: 

Tripwires are proven ways to entice your target audience by lowering the barrier of entry. You may want to do so by offering a freebie/sample product or offering products with low price ranges that they are less hesitant to go for as their first purchase.

After all, who does not like getting free stuff?

After they are satisfied with their first purchase with you, they will come for more purchases. Such satisfied customers also bring good referrals in the future.

Example: When Godiva, the premium Belgian chocolate company opened up their new store in one of the shopping malls in Australia, on the day of Inauguration, they declared free icecreams for everyone. As a result, a long queue formed in the front of the store for free icecreams.

With no promotions, they have been able to get people to join the queue, by copying each other’s behaviour, most of them not knowing what they were waiting for! They waited in the line for over 35- 40 mins on an average for their turn to be served.

Each of their softies cost AUD 8.50 equivalent to INR 450/- and people seemed to enjoy their first free treats very much.

The store is now set up for success serving different flavours of icecreams, softies, coffee and treats targeting children and adults.

1. Retargeting: Retargeting and remarketing are important to address target audience or website visitors when it takes more attempts to turn them into buyers. If they are visiting your website several times, they are definitely liking some aspects of your offerings, but it may not be the right time for them to purchase or they may not be fully convinced yet.

In such cases when you run ads on different platforms and they keep seeing your ads everywhere, they are more likely to remember you and feel connected. They feel your services are for them and they develop an affinity towards your product and purchase your services/products for the first time.

2 Marketing Automation: To build trust in the community, you need to be reliable and true to your commitments. In addition, you need to be mindful of their interests and personal preferences.

With marketing automation, you can do just that. Depending on their interests you can adjust the frequency of the communication and send them contents that they are interested in.

Sending your subscribers information or stuff they are uninterested in, will make them feel you don’t care about their choices and they end up unsubscribing. When your target audience finds you knowledgeable, true and respectful they tend to follow you for a long time and respond to your marketing efforts.

Transaction:

You have so far created content and distributed it over several channels, grabbed your audience attention, gained their trust and made them follow your offered products and services.

Now at the last stage of the funnel the transaction happens, the real sales.

If they have been following and listening to you all the way, the chances are they will buy products and services from you since there is a trust factor; instead of getting from someone unknown to them.

CATT funnel is simple to understand, and it is possible to convert the target audience to buying customers by mindfully practising content, attention, trust and transaction over and over again.

After executing the CATT funnel and penetrating the niche, you may want to look at other niche areas and repeat the cycle with a new set of the target audience.

How to use integrated Digital marketing?

We do several activities online to drive sales on different platforms to generate sales and create revenues.

Most usual approach in digital marketing is using the following marketing strategies.

1. On-page SEO: Optimising the web pages for search engines, so anyone searching on the web can easily find your services.

2. Email marketing: Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach close to the customers with your product/service launches and offers from time to time. Though, it takes time and repeated reminding but works fast by setting a common ground before sending the first mail, like meeting them in person or receiving consent as opt-in newsletter subscribing.

3. Search Engines: You can maximise the power of search engines with the understanding of your customer’s behaviour, thorough knowledge of product/service and knowing how the customers will search for your products. If these elements are known, you can harness the power of Search engines right from your website’s dashboard with details that can make them click through to your website from google search results.

4. Writing quality contents for blogs: Content is the king, and writing quality content for your audience can help you in the long run.

5. Running ads: Adverts are the last thing you will run in your digital marketing strategy to maximise your outputs by working as a catalyst in your sales process. Whether you are considering running Facebook Ad or Google ads, the advertisements can help in speeding up the entire process, and when the other areas are set right, the ads can bring the results faster.

However, to leverage the benefits of digital marketing, you must utilize all the marketing strategies effectively, and let them derive juice from one another.

Take a look here:

How do you integrate your digital marketing efforts on different channels of marketing?

You must utilize the power of Search Engines, email marketing, social media marketing, including ads and quality content to drive the sales of your products/services.

Search Engine + Email marketing + Social media Marketing (Including Ads) + Quality Content -> Sales

Now you know that the ideal way of marketing your products/services digitally is by integrating all the marketing strategies.

But is there a specific way that you can follow? 

In most cases, the process needs repeating to increase brand recognition and enhance brand reputation over some time. Similarly, it’s important to repeat the cycle before the audience starts trusting the brand and they complete their first purchase.

To conclude, take a look at the image below that puts the important aspects of digital marketing together and explains how to use them together.

So, one must understand that your involvement as a digital marketer trying to increase sales through brand recognition and reputation is a long term and cyclic process. Though it takes time to bring the system into place, set up the system and integrate all the marketing strategies, it brings long term benefits with prospects turned to loyal customers.

Do’s and Don’t of Blog Writing

1. Before you begin writing your blogs, select your niche: the area that you have passion and skill and has a market demand.

2. Do not divert into many areas or sectors in the beginning. Focusing only on one area would help you project your image as an expert in that field and help you establish your brand image. 

3. Don’t use too many jargons or technical words in your blogs, writing it in simple language will help readers from different backgrounds.

4. Write your blogs in a friendly, informative and conversational tone.

Some tips for your email marketing campaign:

Once again, the content is the heart of email marketing campaigns.

1. Establishing a common ground with the prospect before sending the first mail helps in ensuring that your mail will be opened and read

2. In cases where the prospect is not a known contact, but has opted in to receive your emails through Website Newsletter subscriptions, is also more likely to welcome your email, open and read it. Such permission-based email lists are effective as the prospects are interested in your products and services and have given you permission to contact with deals / promotions / offers.

3. Subject Line: Your email subject line is the first thing that the receiver notices and decides the next course of action, whether to open the email or not. Hence, your subject line must be very intriguing and must push the receiver open the mail.

4. What to send? Send a good mix of quality content that will benefit the recipient and marketing message so you can promote your products and services. Managing this composition is important because too many marketing messages sometimes pushes the recipients to unsubscribe from the email list. Also, not sending enough marketing messages, you won’t be able to educate them about your offerings and not be able to make any sales and profits.

5. Take opportunity to generate leads at every possible channel where you are delivering content. Integrate lead generation tools at your blogging platform and social media platform where you deliver content and videos and soon.

6. Use email marketing tools: Integrating your email marketing efforts with email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Get Response and Aweber can help you create emails and set up sequence of automated emails to be sent out at regular intervals and track them.

Paid Ads

Instead of running the paid ad campaigns to drive the traffic to sell products or services, you can use the power of ad campaigns to direct the traffic to your contents like blogs, videos, infographics and others. Reading and learning more about your brand helps in establishing long term relationship in the following way:

1. Builds trust: It helps in building trust among the masses

2. Educates the customers: that makes them interested in your products and helps spread the word of mouth

Use the ads to drive the traffic to your content, blog and website where they can take one of these two actions:

1. Read your blog/content and learn more about you
2. Get interested in your offerings and opt-in for newsletters

If you look at it carefully and think, you will realize that this is actually an iterative process.

When you are given permission by a prospect to send them newsletters, you have an opportunity to send them a good mix of quality content and marketing materials. Use this opportunity to send them the link to quality content/blog that you have written or videos about customer experiences etc. Your blogs or contents in turn can have links to the products/services on your website where they can know more about your offerings.

You may be wondering why this method is beneficial in overtaking the audience from ad campaigns to sales.

Here is the reason!

With this method, you are getting to know your customers better and engaging with them for a long time before trying to make sales. When they are invited to visit the link through email invitations, they are more likely to read the content, look around in the website and stay on the pages for longer, thus reducing your bounce off rate. This sends cues to Google and helps with your Off-page SEO.

We also advice the business owners to learn more about the importance of regularly publishing contents on their website and getting SEO trained with us as it can help them in several ways including learning more about their own website, reading Google Analytics report and getting to know more about their users to take the right marketing decisions. Learn more about the 7 reasons why business owners need to learn SEO here. 

Your responsibility as a digital marketer:

1. Being ethical: As a marketer, it’s your responsibility to provide complete and truthful information about the products/services sold. Also, using only ethical SEO practices that are considered optimal for search engines.

2. Commitment to stakeholders: Honoring your commitments to stakeholders, respecting their business privacy is your utmost priority. As a digital marketer, you also handle various social platforms that customers rely on deriving information. You must also ensure there is no mismatch of information on different platforms and they are always the same.

3. Make good habits: We are all slaves to our habits, but there is nothing wrong with it if we form good habits. Make habits of writing high-quality articles on a regular basis with an intention of sharing and benefiting the readers.

4. Chase your passion and not money: Digital marketing is here to stay for a long time. Marketing has always been there and will be there as long as there are demand and supply in the market. Just the form and mode of marketing has changed to digital which allows faster transactions. If you have good communication skills, a passion for marketing, understand the fundamentals of marketing, and understand the requirements of your target customers, you will be able to generate income in any situation.

5. Optimal utilization of resources: Now that you have access to a variety of tools, mediums and platforms, it’s your responsibility to know and put into use all the resources to bring out the best results. Practice integrating your blog posts, email marketing campaigns, social media advertisements and search engine optimization to build trust among your target audience, educate your customers and drive sales effortlessly.

6. Being patient throughout the process: After implementing digital marketing strategies, it’s important to give the system some time. The search engines take time to identify the SEO activities performed and the website user cues in the form of shares, likes and comments. It then rewards you with better visibility with searches in the search results.

Similarly, in the email marketing process, it may take several rounds of email before the customers take a hint from the emails that there may be services that are useful for them and respond to your call of actions. You must understand the marketing needs, perform the integrated digital marketing tasks and monitor your progress from time to time but must consider that some actions do take time before it starts showing results. So be smart, vigilant and responsive.

7. Read regularly and put the learnings into practice to become a better version of yourself: By consuming good content regularly, you can change your mindset, and by consciously practising them, you can become a better version of yourself. Regular reading habits can set you apart from others in the same profession and would also give you an edge in your content writing.

Conclusion:

Digital marketing does offer benefits over and above traditional marketing. And if you want to thrive in your field of digital marketing, understanding the laws of marketing, understanding your buyer behaviours related to your product/ service is very important. Additionally, being an ethical digital marketer and using high-quality content, setting up all the channels of digital marketing and integrating them all to harness the power of digital channels can help your profile and your services stand out of many others.

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