Is content marketing really effective?

👍 Hi Divya,

I truly believe that content marketing is the best form of marketing (especially for B2B).

Here is my POV:

1. Essentially, you should be the 'wikipedia' of your product/service.
2. Content marketing is a long term play.
3. Content builds a deep relationship with your audience.

My best,

Tony

IMO, content marketing only works for SEO if you are willing to invest the time and/or $ to reach critical mass in terms of the amount of content you produce.

On the other hand, if you are targeting B2B customers and have no content, I think that is perceived as a negative. So having some type of content on your site that establishes your knowledge and credibility is almost essential once you get past a certain stage in your growth. The higher the price point, the more likely it is that potential customers are going to need proof of your knowledge.

I have worked with a few early-stage startups but they have never really stuck with their content strategy long enough for me to tell if it pays off. It gets expensive if you aren't doing your own writing and there's no immediate ROI. I have also worked with enterprise-level B2Bs that publish a full set of content (blogs, ebook, case studies) each month. So, it must pull results for them.

Ross Simmonds has some good advice (content) about how to leverage your content so that you get the best return.

It is definitely effective. With some caveats.

1. It has to be amazing content. I’m not talking about good content. It has to truly stand out.
2. It takes a long time. Years possibly.
3. You have to write a lot. Not just monthly. Or even weekly. Probably daily.

Most of our leads come from the two books we published, or some 10,000+ word online guides.

Those take half a year minimum to create.

If you're talking about online user acquisition then yes, it's definitely worth it.

I've tried Ads (Facebook, Google), giveaways, internal referrals, all sorts of things, but no strategy is as cost-effective and as sustainable as content marketing.

In answer to a reply by @gilgildner, I agree that the content you create must be amazing and must be created on a daily basis (for SEO). However, if you do it the right way, you won't have to wait for years to see results (startups don't have time for that, do we?) In my opinion, if you have a good domain that has existed for >1 year, it takes around 3-4 months for your posts to start ranking on Google. In case you share it on social media (Linkedin, I think) it can go viral and it can be ranked faster than that.

Hmu if you have any further question.

yes and no. if you start now to produce YT videos and write blog posts NO, if you know how to scale that YES. Latter is quite hard though, so I'd say content marketing works at some point if you have money for a ded team or if you know how to get traffic from bigger social news sites. Which can work once but never works systematically.

I am making content marketing a big part of my strategy/time in 2020, so will let you know :)

Yes, it works but does not substitute the traditional sales process for b2b. It can take a year to see meaningful lead generation results from content only.