You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything’ stated Beth Comstock. And that is true on more than one count. If you’re trying to sell anything, remember to use the most accessible language. At times the accessibility just doesn’t depend on what you write but also where you write it.
Interrupt selling tactics have given way to creating valuable content to attract potential clients. As of today, 86% of the population skip TV ads, 91% have unsubscribed from email, 44% of direct mail is never opened and 200 million are on the Do not Call list. Where traditional marketing ideas have become outmoded, useful content has become the primary core of marketing.
Using SEO to Leverage In
Business use SEO combined with digital marketing to bring in more visitors and drive in sales. Online businesses have replaced traditional systems of retail and wholesale. There exists only a thin line between a product and a service. It is the value that content adds to marketing which can make a difference in the longer run differentiating the degrees of good marketing. At this juncture we then need to surely ask –
What actually is content and inbound marketing?
Content marketing and SEO is a marketing approach that encompasses the following key strategies:
1. Create and curate valuable and consistent information to engage the customer
2. Distribute content for the relevant audience
3. Retain a clearly segregated audience via the content
How does SEO through content help?
The end goal is to ensure profitable customer transactions. With the main focus on changing and enhancing the customer behaviour, content marketing becomes the art of communication with the customer. Content marketing can be considered to be the precursor to a profitable transaction. Hence it becomes a non-interruptive method of selling a product or a service.
Take for example Intelligentsia coffee integrated content as a marketing strategy by introducing the “Brew Guides “. The “Brew Guides” have been very popular owing to the beautiful photographs which come along with a stepwise instruction for coffee-making tools. This free information has enabled Intelligentsia to engage its audience and prospective customer.
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy which can be summarized in the following four steps:
1. Attract visitors via blogs, keywords and social pulbishin.
2. Convert visitors into leads via forms, calls-to action and landing pages
3. Close leads and convert them into customers with the help of CRM, email and workflows.
4. Delight the customers to make them potential promoters of the company
The intention of inbound marketing is to create an inflow of traffic into the website and ensure a long lasting engagement with the visitor. This becomes an influential step to drive the visitor into becoming a customer. As opposed to old school marketing where there is a sales team assigned to reach out to the prospective customer, inbound marketing reverses the same and hence becomes a non-interruptive method of marketing. In this case, the marketer doesn’t go the customer; instead the customer comes to the company. At the core of it, inbound marketing too is all about content which includes blogs, photos, infographics, videos, podcasts, presentations, e-books, etc.
