An Introduction To The Content Marketing Sphere

According to CMI, around 42% of the B2B marketers think content

marketing is an effective way to attract more leads and 69% think content is the best way to direct mailing and PR.

Hence the phrase ‘Content is the king’ flaunts itself in its way.

Before diving deep into content marketing and content strategy, let’s know about inbound and outbound marketing.

What is outbound Marketing?

When a company initiates conversation and reaches the audience this type of marketing is known as outbound marketing. This is a conventional method of seeking the customers or say potential leads by randomly shooting the content.

What are the examples of Outbound Marketing?

• Cold calling
• Seminars
• Ad flyers
• Commercials
• Media buys
• Emails

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is when you shoot the content to the interested audience, or to a person who is searching for a similar product or services. Digital marketing has introduced a brand-new face of inbound marketing.

What are the examples of Outbound marketing?

• Well Crafted Blogs
• Content Marketing Paid search marketing
• Email marketing

And I might have missed mentioning more examples. So, have you pointed out some points which are common in both inbound and outbound marketing? Yes! ‘The tricky play of content’

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the strategic process of absolute planning and distributing relevant, valuable content of reaching a vast audience. Content marketing boosts brand awareness, sales, loyalty, and interactions.

Why Content Marketing is Important?

Content marketing can also support your business with the following:

• Edify your leads and prospects about your products and services.
• Enhance conversions rates
• Establishes strong relationships between your customers and business.
• You can highlight how your products and services will resolve the challenges
• Content marketing will help you create a sense of brand community.

The Story of SAP: – How SAP generated over 1,000 leads and 7X ROI

That was the year of 2011 the co-CEO of that time, Bill McDermott he found that the site is full of product information and the inspiring stories from the SAP’s customers were missing.

Bill realized that SAP is losing customer engagement and yes! Revenue. Soon Bill established a content marketing and Content strategy department, with the challenge of re-sculpting the brand image.

He wanted to change the way SAP (as a brand) speaks to its digital audience and started a journey that focused more on the customer-centric approach instead of the product-centric approach.

To achieve this, SAP launched its first content marketing site- SAP Business Innovation(now it is Digitalist Magazine), the motto of this site was to engage the first stage or premature period prospects via quality content.

After a deep investigation on the web searches, it came to the notice that there was no content to the topics like ‘Big Data’ or the non-product searches. This was the time when SAP realized that it was failing to capture these potential customers. And here the business case is proven.

And after publishing more than 1000s of blogs and articles it not only saved the budget of advertising but also generated over 1000 leads which were equal to $750,000 in revenue and 7X ROI.

HUBSPOT – THE STRONGEST EXAMPLE OF DOING CONTENT MARKETING RIGHT

HubSpot is the major player in tackling content marketing. It adopted content marketing way before when many companies were not even aware of doing something like this. HubSpot has built a spectacular customer journey that provokes prospect to reach the point of purchase.

The takeaway points from HubSpot, that I was able to figure out was,

• Always have a plan to attract or pull the prospects through the content.
• Do not let your traffic leave the website without providing the email Id.
• CTA at the bottom helps a lot.
• Try implementing plugins and tools that will help to pull the audience.

Vikas Bhatt is a demand generation, content syndication and a data cleansing ninja. He is the co-founder of OnlyB2B, a global organization that helps brands and businesses gain maximum leads and skyrocket revenue.