Marketing content is one of the most effective and powerful ways to promote your products or services. And what makes it even more appealing, it is far less costly than advertising and many other forms of marketing.
A full-page ad in a trade magazine can cost $3,000 to $5,000 or more. Usually, you have to repeat that ad as many as six times before it gets noticed. But how many of us actually look at those ads?
It is estimated that we have exposure to 5,000 marketing messages a day and we likely tune out about 4,995. The odds are stacked against you.
But with marketing content, when someone reads an article about how your product or service has helped one of their peers, that’s an entirely different story. This has impact; it has credibility; it builds trust, and this is how words turn into sales.
So, these are some of the big benefits of marketing content. Here are a few more:
More media exposure.
Once an article about your company, its products or services, gets published, that’s just the beginning. In most cases, it then goes online. When that happens instead of 20,000 subscribers to the publication being exposed to your article, you now have millions of potential end customers reading the same article. Just do a Google under your company name or the products discussed, and there you are. Publications just by their very nature carry a lot of credibility with the search engines. PR is all about credibility; when published online, the power and credibility are multiplied tremendously.
Always in the industry eye.
Except for the very largest companies, it can be very costly to keep advertising month after month in different trade publications. But because marketing content is far less expensive, we can get much more exposure over a much longer period of time. In fact, the secret to effective marketing content is repetition. The more often end-customers read about your product or services, the more they become interested in what you have to offer.
Marketing Content Explains.
Some products or services just cannot be explained in an advertisement. How can a cleaning machine clean without touching? How does a urinal work if it does not use water? Why is hot water better when cleaning carpets? How can a floor mat reduce fatigue and end static?
You can say it does this in an ad but how much “splaining” that ad can do is questionable. On the other hand, when an end-customer reads about how a product or system works, how indeed it does clean without touching, they can see first-hand how they can put the product to use and how it might work for them.
Builds Trust.
It’s harder than ever to build customer trust. One-way marketing content does this is by educating the reader. The article does not always need to revolve around a client’s product or service. Instead, if it can help the reader address a challenge they are currently grappling with, you’ve just created trust and won a loyal follower. And the next step in this budding relationship is sales.
It Snowballs.
We already mentioned that PR marketing communications becomes most effective the more often it is repeated. But, that’s just the beginning. Now what happens, editors from other trade publications come to you for interviews. Your comments are quoted in different articles. Just recently, a college student writing a thesis contacted me asking if he could quote an item from a client’s article. This is the snowball effect of marketing content. I guess you could call it the marketing strategy that just keeps on giving.
AlturaSolutions Turns Words into Sales | 312-880-8176
