Why You Should Focus On Content Marketing To Be Successful

Con­tent is one of the most impor­tant ways to con­nect with cus­tomers. Adver­tise­ments have their place, but con­sumers have learned to trust the brands that pro­vide use­ful and rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion tap­ping direct­ly into their inter­ests and needs. Since we spend so much of our lives online now, it makes sense to meet your cus­tomers there, to offer them expe­ri­ences they’ll value.

Tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­u­ous­ly evolves—as do cus­tomer expec­ta­tions. They demand speed and rel­e­vance. They want to feel engaged. This pro­vides more oppor­tu­ni­ties for brands to con­nect and build those all-impor­tant cus­tomer rela­tion­ships, to estab­lish your author­i­ty, increase your dig­i­tal foot­print, pro­vide val­ue in a mean­ing­ful but unob­tru­sive way, and dri­ve traf­fic to your website.

Con­tent mar­ket­ing has become so impor­tant that some brands have devel­oped “head of con­tent” roles. It’s a new area with­out the tra­di­tion­al para­me­ters of, say, an account­ing team, whose roles are more clear­ly defined. View this as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­play your brand’s per­son­al­i­ty, and com­mit your­self to cre­at­ing con­tent that builds rela­tion­ships in ways that oth­er strate­gies may not.

This focus on con­tent doesn’t come with­out risk. Many of these pro­fes­sion­als may lack the lead­er­ship skills required to think beyond their small sec­tor to the com­pa­ny as a whole. They may strug­gle to com­mu­ni­cate the impor­tance of their department’s work to com­pa­ny leaders—but that is a vital part of the job, since pro­duc­ing con­tent requires money.

So heads of con­tent need to be sto­ry­tellers with the vision to engage exist­ing and future cus­tomers, but they must also have the abil­i­ty to demon­strate that this strat­e­gy will gen­er­ate rev­enue. They are com­mu­ni­cat­ing a brand’s iden­ti­ty, rein­forc­ing its lega­cy, enter­tain­ing and enlight­en­ing cus­tomers while steer­ing them toward the kinds of expe­ri­ences that cement their loy­al­ty. All of this takes time. When recruit­ing for this role, look for some­one with busi­ness acu­men as well as that cre­ative spark.

Think about the con­tent your brand is pro­duc­ing. How are you defin­ing your per­son­al­i­ty as a brand through con­tent? Is your cur­rent out­put help­ing you devel­op bet­ter rela­tion­ships with cus­tomers? Are you using every avail­able resource, includ­ing video and audio con­tent, memes, info­graph­ics, and more? Do you have the cre­ative lead­er­ship required to dri­ve an effec­tive con­tent mar­ket­ing strategy?