By Helen Clark, Marketing and Communications Assistant at ContentPlus

Content marketing is a way of creating and sharing content to promote ideas, engage targeted audiences and encourage them to take action. It’s an integrated approach to marketing, with quality content at its heart.

Just as the heart powers the body, content powers online marketing success. Quality content in the form of blogs, social media posts, search-optimised articles and so on is a driving factor in attracting new customers and building brand loyalty – as we demonstrated in our infographic the Anatomy of Content Marketing.

Let’s take the anatomy analogy a bit further. Quality content also acts as a great channel for word of mouth promotion, the primary factor in half of buying decisions – if you publish interesting content, people will talk about your brand.

It increases visibility, thanks to inbound links driving more traffic to the site, while these also boost visibility in SERPs.

Just like the arms, quality content provides a wider reach, while also carrying out the hard work in generating leads, lending a new meaning to many hands make for light work.

It takes on the tough marketing legwork, by encouraging the sharing of your brand’s content through social media. And while doing all this, it provides your marketing efforts with a solid footing, ensuring that when customers come to your website they find information that is both engaging and relevant.

As with any online marketing strategy, when it comes to publishing quality content, the proof is the pudding.

In the week after releasing our infographic we saw a 446 per cent increase in visits to our site. Page views increased by 219 per cent and our infographic accounted for 58 per cent of all page views.

One third of visitors in that first week were new to our site and we’re still seeing daily visits and retweets almost one month after we first published it. It also proved a big hitter on Pinterest, until recently one of the lesser known social networks.

For us, these figures really speak for themselves. Quality content is at the heart of an integrated, targeted approach to marketing. If you want to know more, come and see us at stand 4 at SMWF Europe.