Scribewise, a division of Trellist Marketing and Technology, develops and executes content marketing strategy and solutions. Scribewise is an outsourced newsroom that creates smart content to fuel marketing initiatives. Trellist acquired Scribewise in 2014 to expand its wide range of marketing and technology services; leveraging its other powerful divisions and digital business values, Trellist boldly delivers intelligent business solutions.
You’ve likely heard the phrase content marketing over the last couple of years. Maybe you’ve embraced the concept. Or maybe you’re perplexed by what people are talking about.
First, let’s define exactly what we’re talking about when we use the term content marketing: content marketing is the creation and distribution of journalistic, audience-focused material that helps people do their jobs or live their lives.
So why is that important?
The New Buyer’s Journey
It’s important because of today’s increasingly digital buying and selling environment. Today, the customer is in control of the relationship. The buyer’s journey has completely shifted over the last decade, and now it is incumbent upon marketers to engage with prospective customers before they’re ready to buy. Think about your own buying experience, and how often you turn to the Internet before you start shopping.
Where the buyer once took a straightforward path to making a purchase, it is now far more complex, and conducted completely at the whim of the buyer. Today, the education phase of the buyer’s journey is conducted at whatever pace the buyer chooses. They seek information whenever, wherever and however they want. The challenge for brands is to deliver the buyer useful information in a multitude of ways.
When those prospective customers are searching, they’re looking for an organization they want to do business with. We can buy goods and services from anywhere in the world – down the street, London, Hong Kong – wherever. That means the battle to win the customer is fiercer than ever before.
Where Content Marketing Comes In
And high quality, journalistic, audience-focused content can help you win that battle. By delivering great content into the marketplace, a brand begins to garner attention, engage the audience and build trust. A content strategy feeds consumer desire to seek information and form opinions. It begins to create a deeper-level relationship with the audience.
Of course, this isn’t easy to do. A brand that launches a content marketing strategy is committing to become a publisher. Being a publisher is quite different from traditional marketing efforts. Ongoing content creation requires talent, dedication and relentlessness.
But there’s more to it than that – suddenly, your team will be charged with creating a constant river of content, which requires creativity at a fast tempo. For those accustomed to logical, linear processes, the content creation “process” might be a shock to the system. As they say, people who enjoy sausage and news should never witness either being made. And here’s the scary secret about content creation – it has to be chaotic. At the heart of it, content marketing is a creative process, and it can’t be tamped down too much by process.
This is why we founded Scribewise, and why Trellist acquired us. Scribewise is an outsourced newsroom that helps our clients set and execute their content strategy. Together, with Trellist’s powerful marketing and technology services, we can deliver effective results that produce a real ROI.
For the brand, it can be hard work. But the rewards are significant. Closing a sale with a prospective customer that has already engaged with your content becomes almost a formality – you’ve already demonstrated your thinking and approach and created a relationship based on trust. Research backs this up – one study shows that content marketing saves 13% in overall cost of a business lead, and that content-driven organic search outperforms outbound marketing by a 14:1 ratio1. Another study shows that B2B firms with blogs report 67% more business leads2. And on and on it goes.
Content marketing works. The time to dive in is now… before your competitors do. Check out the infographic below to travel The New Buyer's Journey. And follow us on Twitter @trellist or, connect with us via info@trellist.com.
1Hubspot - The 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Annual Report
2http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5807/How-Many-Posts-Does-Your-Business-Blog-Need-to-Grow-Leads-At-Least-20.aspx