The Importance of a Content Marketer

Content marketing is the promotion of a product, product or service through content that is useful and relevant to the reader. In simple words, it’s the creation and distribution of articles, videos, posts, and newsletters on behalf of a company that help readers entertain or solve a problem. When readers understand that a company’s content is useful, interesting and meets their needs, they trust it more and are more likely to choose its products or services when they need them.

Content marketing allows you to achieve different goals: to increase brand awareness, to gain the trust of potential customers and even to sell. It’s comprehensive promotion: you can’t do one article and expect it to bring in a hundred sales at once. So how does content marketing fit into the main promotion strategy?

How does content marketing work?

For example, a company sells apartments. It has a website where you can select a floor plan, calculate the cost of a mortgage, and leave an application. The marketer sets up advertising on this site in social networks and search engines, selecting the right audience. People click through the ads, study the site, the company’s offerings, close and think about whether or not to take it. The more expensive the product, the longer it will take a person to make a decision – in the case of apartments, up to three years.

But while the customer is pondering, he is not ready to buy. He needs to weigh everything, learn about the pitfalls, ask his friends, read reviews. Something like this a person experiences when he is going to write an essay. And at different stages of these reflections, he needs different information about our company. This is called Hunt’s ladder – the stages of the buying decision. This is where content marketing comes in: while the person is thinking, the content marketer calculates his steps and gives him exactly the content that will help him now.

And this landing page will lead not only to advertising, but also to a specially commissioned article about choosing an apartment on some major resource. So the content marketer has the task of telling what to pay attention to when choosing, what the pros and cons of different layouts are, what to ask the developer – and in the end the client will receive a link to the necessary site. The client will be already prepared: he has been told useful information and “warmed up”, the first contact has been made.

Now, when he gets on the website, he can be offered to leave an application and get a checklist for checking the apartment before buying as a gift. This is useful content that the potential buyer will definitely need.

All this is not spam: a person has subscribed because such content is interesting and important to him, and the company’s task is to give him exactly what the reader needs, and not what he wants to tell himself.

All this is what a content marketer does: he studies a product, a company, its advantages, customers’ behavior, and on the basis of the analysis he builds a strategy: what kind of article to write, where to put it, where to guide a reader after, what and when to send it in the newsletter, what to show in social networks and ads, what to fill your YouTube channel with. The content marketer manages all the content of the company, not only in the blog and social networks, but also on external platforms, he knows exactly where the right audience is, and builds a dialogue with it. In this way you can achieve not only recognition and loyalty, but also subscribers and sales.

Content marketing is a long-term job, you can’t just run an ad once for an article and expect wow-effect: you have to write articles, newsletters, test lead-magnets, communicate with your audience and know their needs and problems well. If a company can solve a client’s problem with an article, it means that he will come back to it with money for a product, because he will feel a connection: these guys know what I think and what I want, so their product will definitely suit me.

What a content marketer does?

The content marketer starts with an audit: how people have bought the product before, what they asked in comments, chats, and on the phone, what they didn’t understand, what stopped them and what, on the contrary, encouraged them to buy. He also conducts Customer Development – a detailed survey of customers, as they will give the most complete and accurate information about their motivation to buy.

From all this data there are a lot of topics that can be disclosed by content, and the task of the content marketer is to understand what type of content for what issue will be more successful to disclose the topic.

The main goal that unites all the actions of a content marketer is to gather an audience of people who are interested in our topics and can potentially use our product. Then a marketer gradually “warm up” this audience and sell the product.

So when planning your strategy, you need to keep the customer journey in mind: where they came from, where they will go, how to get them back, and how to sell them the product. This path is called the Customer Journey Map.

What kind of business needs content marketing?

No business targeting repeat sales can do without content marketing. Small and medium-sized businesses need to pay special attention to KM: it’s hard to break through among the giants and market monopolists, and content helps you stand out and reach the audience you want.

If your product or service has a story to tell, if 90% of sales do not come from supermarkets and you want to sell online in addition to offline, and especially if your business is exclusively online – content marketing will expand your opportunities, bring a new audience, reduce the cost of attracting customers and in the long run increase your sales.

Why is promotion impossible without content marketing? Because anyone goes through Hunt’s ladder before making a purchase – doubting, comparing, thinking, researching more information, just depending on the price and complexity of the product, it can take a few minutes or it can take days, months, or even years. And all this time you can’t fill him only with selling materials: on the early “steps”, that is, the stages of making a decision, he is not yet ready even to think about buying, he is only aware of the need he wants to satisfy.

For such purposes, informational, useful content is needed, where the content marketer only gets to know the reader and establishes the first contact, showing that he can be trusted.

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