Content marketing involves creation and distribution of relevant, valuable, engaging and riveting content that will be of interest to your particular target market. Content marketing is critical to supporting your sales process. Competition for time and attention of your prospects is ever increasing. Generating powerful and convincing messaging has never been more vital. Inbound marketing practices have repeatedly proven to lower the cost of lead generation by nearly 50 percent over the conventional outbound marketing.
The increasing value of content in online marketing is closely matched by the rising competition for time and attention of prospects. Statistics reveal that every minute attracts nearly:
- 3000 photo uploads
- 1.3 million video views on YouTube
- 100000 tweets
- 2 million Google search queries
- Over 200 million emails and
- 6 million Facebook logins.
The link of social media, SEO and content offers you a significant opportunity to maximize customers’ attention along the journey through the sales cycle lasting from awareness till purchase. With proper goals and a weighed approach, an optimized and socialized content marketing framework can assist you in delivering better and highly motivated prospects to sales. The framework starts with an improved way of defining customer segments and at the same time understanding
customer objectives that will enable you to come up with a content plan.
Social media promotion and keyword optimization are crucial parts of your content marketing process. Optimized and socialized content relevant to the buying cycles’ stages will allow prospects to find solutions using search and be motivated to share their findings via social media. Various forms of business value are achieved through optimized and socialized content marketing and these can be better visualized by understanding the role played by content across your
customers’ life cycle.
1. Building awareness
At the initial stage, content adds to the building of awareness for your 
brand by assisting people to find your service or
product via search, social tools or other means through which content can act as a source of information.
2. Consideration by prospects
In the consideration stage, which follows after a prospect becomes aware of your brand and solutions, content educates them on your selling proposition. The available content on your blog, website, social networks, and other platforms should provide ease for prospects and customers to understand the gains and benefits that you intend to offer. A persistent search and presence on social media can significantly raise credibility and shorten the sales cycles.
3. Sealing the Gaps
Once you have earned the customers loyalty, and they’ve decided to buy from you, do not assume this to be the end of the line for content marketing and optimization. 
More work still needs to be done in regard to refining the effectiveness of the content’s ability to deliver sales and inquiries. Analysis of Website statistics and online sales paths that are responsible for tracking content viewed by your customer prior to purchase can aid in refining all things from keyword focus of your search and social media optimization to optimization aimed at conversion performance.
4. Customer Motivation through Service
In the service stage, content plus social applications motivate customers towards having a great experience on your site, even when they aren’t buying. Content such as FAQs and additional information touching on your brand will provide customers with a baseline after-purchase support service they can dash to anytime to find answers without contacting your customer service personnel. This makes it easy to get their questions answered and allows you to save on support costs while boosting customer satisfaction.
5. Customer Loyalty
The loyalty stage enables people to adore your products, visit your website several times and to engage with you on social
media net-works. Each of the customer interactions with your content provides deeper insights into their interests and motivations. Webinars, how-to articles, Newsletters and similar kind of content that assists customers in getting extra out of their purchases and relationships with the brand, can aid in fostering loyalty over and beyond your competition.
6. Advocacy
In the stage of advocacy, your customer base is heavily sharing your content and pouring praise upon you online using social
media networks and going wild about how they find your social presence and website very useful. With every new person your customers tell about your services, product or company, the entire cycle begins over and over again as your customers keep on referring new clients to your business.
The content marketing value stretches beyond the attraction of leads and sales, it also functions to:
- Foster good will
- Enhance the value of a brand
- Provide empowerment to fans
- Add inspiration for your loyal fans to refer your much liked products or services to other people.
As you create and implement your marketing plan, you should have in mind the holistic and wholesome impact of content as pertains to reaching and interacting with your customer base to guarantee a sustained business relationship.To attain a successful and effective marketing results, you should opt for content marketing as the best strategy.
