Sales realisation being the ultimate objective of any business to survive and thrive, it is the marketing that often forms a huge chunk of the company’s overall expenses. Whether the businesses are local, national or global they always have a requirement for marketing promotions in order to reach out to their customers. And marketing and sales promotions mean nothing without properly planned and delivered content through advertising, public relations, seminars & conferences, influencer campaigns, blogs and many of the social media tools.
If marketing is a way of creating genuine customer value and enriching their lives through great brand experience, an appropriate content strategy is something that can help achieve it better and much faster. It is therefore important for an organisation to have a clear view of content, which needs to be treated like an asset that creates value over a period of time.
Whether it is to describe your products and services or communicating the brand propositions, content leads the way to draw attention and creating engagement with your audience and even closing the business deals for that matter. In fact, without proper content and it’s delivery the organisation will freeze to function as it will be unable to communicate.
Let’s look at it like this. You have a great marketing strategy and have prepared a suitable marketing plan also to reach out the desired audience. Now the question is how do you prove your marketing claim? How do you ensure that the abilities, expertise and experience your brand claims are reached out to the audience to relate, understand, explore, accept and eventually become your loyal customers? And that’s where the play of content comes in purely as an investment into your brand. And in today’s times, the content is ever powerful having capabilities to create, change, alter and build perceptions sometimes even overnight.
Moreover, when the content is great it also has everlasting shelf life. It remains available for audiences to consume the content as and when they want to, as many times as they want to share or forward and promote as often as they want to. Online presence enables content being available to your audience longer, while the traditional content like advertisements or brochures or flyers have limited availability and therefore, they also make a limited impact.
Successful marketers, brand communicators do not treat content as an expense as they believe in its ability to deliver results in terms of measurable revenues. Instead, they invest in producing high-quality content and not focus on minimising its cost. When marketers start looking at content marketing as an investment and not an expense, the high-quality content coming out becomes a trigger for revenue generation.
Of course, it is important to understand the content marketing strategy and how it is being deployed. Any content having a long shelf in today’s online world has a huge potential to provide lasting value to any brand. Besides, it can always help in providing maximum returns to the marketing efforts and facilitates better customer retention, enhanced sales, increased engagement and an elevated level of brand awareness among the audience.
Though content marketing budgets have traditionally been low, nowadays brand marketers have been increasing such budgets consciously to get a better and faster impact. We have plenty of options of content required in the new age media environment including videos, graphics, infographics, infomercials, listicles, blogs and so on and so forth.
In today’s times of connected world, content can make a direct impact over how many people got connected, what kind of engagement was experienced, how many conversations were started, how many new relationships were formed, what was the content generated by the users further, did this engagement led to sales leads, were the sales leads converted into revenues, etc.
Content if smartly planned and intelligently deployed doesn’t remain as cost or an expense for the brands but becomes a revenue-generating machine instead!
The views and opinions published here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the publisher.
Praveen has been closely associated with many national and international events related to cinema for children, art and culture. He has a well-rounded experience that cuts across all key sectors of PR & Corporate Communications.
He started his career with URJA Communications, an advertising agency specialising in technology brands, where he was instrumental in developing the PR division. Post this, he had a stint with Horizons Porter Novelli, a global public relations consultancy. Thereafter, he was heading the IT & Telecom division at Clea PR, a leading Indian public relations and communications company followed by a fairly long stint with Omnicom Group agencies viz. TBWA\India and Brodeur India.
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