Email Marketing & Content Marketing
Content marketing and email marketing are some of the most standard and effective ways to promote a business in the digital age. In an age of mobile apps, push notifications and virtual reality… email is still the most effective way to reach your audience and convert them into paying customers.
Here are the things you should consider regarding content marketing and email marketing.
1) Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to the practice of publishing pieces of online content with the intent of using them as a marketing channel. There are dozens of different forms of content, including but not limited to:
- blog posts
- e-books
- social media posts
- infographics
- videos
- comics
- original research
- newsletters
- podcasts
- webinars
Some types of content are a better fit for certain businesses and industries, and some are easier to produce than others. Finding a suitable and cost-effective way to get your content marketing efforts started is a crucial first step into the digital marketing arena.
Content marketing’s primary purpose is to draw in interested consumers, but its ability to help you build your subscriber list for future email marketing strategies is almost equally important. Some businesses will block off some of their content until an email address is given while some will only solicit this information as a side note; whichever route you take, you must ensure your content is attached to some email address collection conduit.
Content also drives organic page views for your website that help to bolster your Google rankings, and you can have it republished on other third-party sites to further increase its range (this is called content syndication). If done well and consistently, this can also give you a boost in SEO.
Content marketing must be done regularly and consistently to have the desired effect. Ultimately, you should aim to develop a multi-faceted content calendar so you can keep track of what you’re releasing and make sure there are no significant gaps in your schedule.
Your content must also be high-quality and relevant to your audience – poorly executed or highly derivative pieces will not only make your business look bad, but they are also unlikely to be consumed very much and will probably be dismissed by Google as well. Don’t skimp on your content strategies; there’s a lot riding on their success.
2) Email Marketing
So you have the subscribers: now what do you do with them?
One popular strategy is to send weekly, monthly, or otherwise regularly-scheduled emails to everyone on your list. These regular points of contact remind your customers that your business exists (TOMA, Top Of Mind Awareness) and foster a positive engagement with your brand.
In these emails, you might choose to promote upcoming sales, preview new products and services, inform customers of current events in your business or industry, or anything else you think might get recipients excited to buy from you. Keep in interesting and relevant to the people receiving them, or they will simply discard these emails.
Unlike typical marketing methods like street signs and mailed flyers, email marketing campaigns are advertisements that people must voluntarily opt into (CASL, CAN-SPAM, GDPR); this promotes a sense of intimacy and exclusivity as if they are personally connected to your business and its affairs.
Because everything is done virtually, email marketing also costs very little, and that makes its sizable returns all the more impressive. Its results are also very easily tracked with highly accurate computerized data collection methods, allowing you to see for yourself what kind of an impact it’s having on your sales. Email marketing is so simple and has so many upsides that there’s no reason not to make room for it in your marketing efforts.
