What Is Content Marketing?
Useful content should be at the core of your marketing
Traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective by the minute; as a forward-thinking marketer, you know there has to be a better way. Enter content marketing. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.
Content marketing is used by leading brands
Our annual research shows the vast majority of marketers are using content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere. It’s also developed and executed by small businesses and one-person shops around the globe. Why? Because it works.
Here is just one example of content marketing in action:
Looking for more examples of content marketing? Download our Ultimate e-book with 75 content marketing examples.
Content marketing is good for your bottom line — and your customers
Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for enterprises that use content marketing:
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Increased sales
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Cost savings
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Better customers who have more loyalty
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Content is the present – and future – of marketing
Go back and read the content marketing definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable. That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.” Companies send us information all the time – it’s just that most of the time it’s not very relevant or valuable (can you say spam?). That’s what makes content marketing so intriguing in today’s environment of thousands of marketing messages per person per day.
Search Algorithms
Google ranking systems sort through hundreds of millions of webpages in the Search index to give you useful and relevant results in a fraction of a second. These ranking systems are made up of a series of algorithms that analyze what it is you are looking for and what information to return to you. And as we’ve evolved Search to make it more useful, we’ve refined our algorithms to assess your searches and the results in finer detail to make our services work better for you.
Here are some of the ways Google uses Search algorithms to return useful information from the web:
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Analyzing your words
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Matching your search
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Ranking useful pages
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Considering context
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Returning the best results
What is ReTargeting and How Does it Work?
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced traffic after they leave your website. For most websites, only 2% of web traffic converts on the first visit. Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away.
How Does ReTargeting Work?
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple JavaScript code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web.
Here’s how it works: you place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is unnoticeable to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance. Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your cookied visitors browse the Web, the cookie will let your re-targeting provider know when to serve ads, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.
Re targeting is so effective because it focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interest. That’s why most marketers who use it see a higher ROI than from most other digital channels.
When Does ReTargeting Work?
Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool, but it works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy.
Retargeting works best in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing or demand generation. Strategies involving content marketing, AdWords, and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization. Conversely, retargeting can help increase conversions, but it can’t drive people to your site. Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and retargeting to get the most out of that traffic.
Want to learn more? Check these reference:
For a more detailed introduction to how retargeting works, read more information on Retargeting.
When it comes to choosing a retargeting provider, it’s not always obvious which service model is right for you. To help you decide, read Should You Go With a Self-Serve Retargeter?
Not all retargeting campaigns are created equal. Avoid the top pitfalls by reading 7 Major Mistakes of Retargeting.