Companies across industries have embraced content marketing for growing their businesses, and new A.I. technology is enabling personalization that takes content marketing to a whole new level.
What is Content Marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute, a leading global marketing education and training organization, defines content marketing as:
"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."
The fundamental premise of the content marketing approach is that in a digital world where customers are accustomed to tuning out advertising, that by providing an on-going stream of useful information, your business achieves growth through increased customer engagement.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Increased customer engagement from content marketing drives long-term business growth in three ways:
1) Increased trust and loyalty. By providing content that is continually useful to your customers, whether it is to solve their problems or make their lives easier, you are creating a trust relationship with them. They see your on-going commitment to providing relevant content as your business being more than just a provider of services or products, but rather, as your business being also invested in supporting their needs. This commitment on your part generates trust that helps new customers to make a positive purchase decision, and generates loyalty that helps existing customers stay on as customers, while being a source of referrals to friends and family.
2) Brand enhancement. Another benefit of content marketing is brand enhancement. By providing useful, relevant content in addition to a quality service or product, by definition you have enhanced your brand value to your prospects and customers.
3) Increased sales. As with any effective marketing strategy, you want to see increased sales. Content marketing achieves increased sales both indirectly and directly. Beyond the increased sales that come indirectly from increased trust and brand enhancement, content marketing also achieves increased sales directly by providing you with on-going opportunities to place targeted advertising around your content.
How Personalization Takes to Next Level
As mentioned above, effective content marketing requires providing customers with consistent valuable and relevant information. Personalization of the content for the particular needs of each customer enables the content to be highly relevant to each customer, and therefore, significantly more valuable to them.
Matching content to each customer's specific goals and situation is very challenging to do even once, let alone doing this on an on-going basis. However, artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology provides the digital alchemy to turn data and information into customer-specific useful content that engages each customer uniquely, because the content is so personalized for their needs.
Companies across industries are achieving business growth through embracing content marketing, and A.I.-powered personalization enables content marketing to go to the next level.
