Strategy

Content marketing: importance in the marketing mix of the future

To understand the importance of content marketing, you first need to know what content marketing actually is.

Content marketing is a type of corporate communication that can be marketed in two different ways. Roughly speaking, content marketing is divided into push and pull marketing measures.

The pull strategy is considered particularly successful and cost-friendly. Content is distributed via the company's own online channels to attract potential customers and interested parties.

Content marketing is about adding value and building a relationship with the target audience. It's about reaching customers and prospects with content that is entertaining, informative, educational, and useful to them.

This fact makes content marketing so important. You can generate potential customers and do something for your SEO at the same time.

As a core element of all inbound marketing, content marketing has established itself in recent years as a communication strategy and advertising measure in equal measure.

From individual entrepreneurs to global players, no one can deny that content marketing is important. But how big is this significance in numbers? And what does that mean for your marketing mix in the future?

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Content marketing: importance as a communication tool for brands

Content marketing fulfills several functions for companies. It serves advertising, customer generation and brand communication, as well as search engine optimization. It thus plays an elementary role in the marketing mix for companies.

When we talk about the marketing mix, we are referring to the four pillars on which a company's entire marketing system is built: pricing policy, product policy, distribution policy and communication policy.

Content marketing is a core element in at least 50 percent of these areas. Depending on how you weight your pull and push measures, it individually takes a larger or a somewhat smaller part in the marketing mix.

Regardless of the respective weighting, however, one thing is certain:

Content marketing has long been an integral part of every communication and distribution policy. So let's venture a look into the future of marketing.

CMOs agree on the importance of content marketing

If you ask 1,000 marketing managers from German-speaking countries, 93 percent of them will say: Content marketing is an important part of the marketing mix 2020. This is what the marketing and PR agency fischerAppelt found out in a survey together with Quadriga University.

For marketers from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, content marketing plays a particularly important role in the first phases of the customer journey.

52 percent rely on the effect of content, especially in the awareness stage. 51 percent also rely on it in the interest-building phase, and 40 percent still let their content do the convincing.

Bedeutung Content Marketing im Marketing-Mix der Zukunft; Quelle: <a href="https://www.fischerappelt.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Wie-sehen-Sie-die-Zukunft-von-Content-Marketing-1600x1011.jpg">fischerAppelt</a>

On the one hand, this also means that too many marketing managers are still missing out on a lot by not using content marketing in the other phases of the customer journey.

On the other hand, this also means that content marketing has found a permanent place in the catalog of measures of experienced marketing pros. And rightly so:

Interesting content convinces users, followers, interested parties and customers

US marketing strategist Ross Simmonds has summarized some interesting numbers that prove content marketing works.

Companies that integrate a blog on their website, which they regularly feed with useful content, can increase the indexing of individual pages by a remarkable 434 percent.

Simmonds' core business is B2B companies, which is why he has fairly reliable figures from this area in particular. According to these, a business can generate 67 percent more leads per month via a well-done blog than brands that don't blog.

Incidentally, case studies are particularly effective in this context - at least that's what 64 percent of the B2B companies surveyed said.

Case Studies im B2B Content Marketing; Quelle: <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/14855770">TopRankBlog</a>

Last but not least, good content also works in the B2C sector. For customers and prospects, content with added value is one of the top three reasons for them to become followers on social media such as Facebook and Twitter or subscribe to a newsletter. And why is that?

Content is informative, useful, entertaining advertising

This means that content marketing works better than ads or banners. Matthias Wesselmann of fischerAppelt, for example, knows that German consumers have no problem with content marketing as long as companies are transparent about it.

So if a blog article or video is not disguised as independent, but it is clearly communicated who the content comes from and how it relates to the brand, business or product.

According to contentbird's findings, that doesn't stop 70 percent of people from reading up on content pieces.

Because they simply offer better opportunities to engage intensively with a product than other online advertising. It is therefore not surprising that companies achieve 8 times higher conversion rates via content marketing than via other marketing channels.

And all this at 62 percent lower costs than other marketing measures on average. So while you're saving on expenses with content marketing, you're also making a profit on revenue.

However, it is not only the figures that speak in favor of giving content marketing an appropriate place in the marketing mix of the future.

contentbird Infografik mit Zahlen zum Content Marketing; Quelle: <a href="https://de.contentbird.io/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Infografik-von-contentbird-zum-Thema-Content-Marketing-.jpg">contentbird</a>

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Content Marketing: Importance for SEO

Measures around your content marketing not only fulfill the goals of generating customers, increasing sales and improving reach. With content marketing, you can also achieve the goal of better visibility in the SERPs. Because a blog, a Facebook group, regular posts and shares by your followers, improve your ranking sustainably.

Since Google's algorithm increasingly emphasizes added value, sustainability, timeliness and reader benefit, content pieces that fulfill these aspects are ranked better.

Google rewards content that is read, commented on and shared a lot. Of course, even the best content cannot replace onpage SEO and keyword analysis. But in combination with it, it significantly improves your chances of a good ranking.

The formula is simple: the more good content you provide, the better for your SEO. And the better your SEO, the more traffic, more leads and more customers you can generate.

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The target group always in focus

With ever smarter and more differentiated algorithms, customer centricity is becoming increasingly important in content marketing. The marketing experts surveyed by fischerAppelt in their 2018 study are also aware of this.

Nearly 60 percent rely on their own data to define their target group. To do this, they rely primarily on surveys among their customers and on values from analytics tools.

Welche Resourcen nutzen Unternehmen zur Zielgruppendefinition; Quelle: <a href="https://www.fischerappelt.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Welche-Daten-nutzen-Sie-zur-Definition-Ihrer-Zielgruppe-1600x1011.jpg">fischerAppelt</a>

Understanding and recognizing your target audience is important. With this knowledge, you can optimize your content even better. This, in turn, is beneficial to the goals you want to achieve with your content marketing.

And so the circle closes at exactly the point where it begins: with customer focus.

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Give your content marketing importance in your marketing mix

Content marketing is a central control button for all your marketing efforts. Valuable content is not only a great advertisement for your business, your brand or your product. With good content, precise customer analysis and an appropriate strategy, you support

  • your SEO and increase traffic, visibility, leads and conversions,
  • Your social media management by seeding articles, videos and graphics across platforms,
  • Your push marketing measures, such as your pay-per-click: Traffic and response to your content can help you choose topics, keywords, and search terms for ads.

Content marketing is not an invention of the technological age, but it has a long history and development behind it. From one-page promotional articles in print magazines to branded customer magazines to blogs, micro-influencers and collaborations.

What does this teach us? That content marketing existed long before there was a definition for it and it became a buzzword.

But it also proves that content marketing has always been important in corporate communications and has become increasingly effective and relevant since its early beginnings as John Deere's customer magazine.

How can you make your marketing mix fit for the future with content marketing? The contentbird whitepaper will tell you. Download it for free and benefit from helpful examples, checklists and insights.

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Strategy

Content marketing: importance in the marketing mix of the future

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