What is a content Integrated Online Marketing Strategy?
| by David Callan There are still a lot of uncertainties about many aspects of online marketing. However one clear factor that is emerging is the increasingly thin line between content and effective advertising online. If anything the line diving the two is rapidly disappearing.One of the things that has greatly speeded up this process is the rapid rise
of content integrated online marketing. What is content integrated marketing?
As the name suggests, this is where useful content doubles up as one big advertisement
for a product or service. The real power of content integrated marketing is
in having some genuinely useful and valuable information that points readers
to a particular product or service without making it look or sound like an
advertisement.
Why Content Integrated Marketing Is So Effective
The World Wide Web is many things to many people, but it is essentially an information tool. People seek information that will improve their knowledge and sharpen their skills.
This is one of the reasons why most people will go to great lengths to avoid ads online. In the same way that they will be eager to find useful appropriate information. In other words useful, valuable information online will always find a huge, eager and captive audience. You can now begin to imagine the impact of such information when it points to a particular relevant useful product or service.
The real power of content integrated marketing has hardly been exploited online. There is little doubt that in future it will be a key element in any online marketing or promotional effort.
Lots of Creativity Required In Content Integrated Marketing
Do not for a single moment confuse content integrated marketing with an article that tries to make a weak desperate link to a product or service. Most readers will be able to see through such an article from miles away. Neither is it the usual article with an appropriate resource box at the bottom begging you to visit a website.
A proper content integration marketing effort will be the sort of article that will be eagerly read and the association to a certain product or service will not take away the value of the article.
For instance a valuable, well-written SEO (Search Engine Optimization) article that describes how a website moved from zero visitors to 5,000 hits a day within two weeks would be of great interest to a vast majority of us. In this case, mentioning the link-generating software or tool that was used to accomplish this amazing leap in traffic is such a key part of the article that leaving it out would greatly weaken the article.
Good content integrated marketing requires a lot of creativity to execute properly. Still it is well worth the effort because when properly executed any article will generate thousands of valuable leads for the client business for many years to come.
Getting The Advertiser/Content Mix Right Calls For Plenty Of Research
When executed effectively it is all made to look very simple. However there is a lot of work that goes into any content integrated marketing effort. To be successful, the focus must start with typical problems faced by the target market that you have in mind. The more serious the problem, the better. All this is with the assumption that the product or service you are promoting is effective. This is very important. If it is not effective then your promotional effort will just not work. It will end up falling flat on its’ face.
Identifying these pressing problems will call for lots of research. Fortunately, research is fairly easy to accomplish online. One can actually do plenty of useful research online for free. This is a huge advantage when you consider what some simple offline research usually costs a company. Only the very large and prosperous enterprises can afford it.
Online there is a lot of free research that can be done which will yield lots of useful information. By simply visit discussion forums or even going further and asking a question or two, lots of data and information can be instantly generated. Not to mention the fact that blogs, which allow for comments and reactions from readers, can yield a lot of valuable information that can help any online marketer create an effective content integrated promotional effort.
In Conclusion
Using these few tips, you can go ahead and attempt to create some content that merges your content directly with your key product or service and see the impact that it has on your online business.