Blog – Girlpower Marketing

Is Content Marketing Your Key to Capturing New Customers?

There is one undeniable truth about content marketing: It’s crucial to capturing new customers while retaining loyal buyers. Let’s break it down a little.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a long-term strategy to deliver quality content to your target audience that aims to build trust, boost engagement, and ultimately increase conversions through creative content delivery. By offering unique blog articles and videos on your website, you can boost your search engine ranking by including the usual keywords and phrases consumers use when researching products online.

Whether you encountered content marketing as a strategy back in the early aughts or as recently as the COVID crisis, content marketing is much older than you think. Back in 1918, Jell-O started placing ads with recipes in “Ladies Home Journal,” while the very first example was a John Deer magazine designed for farmers in 1895. And we all remember the catalogs every store sent out before e-commerce took over.

Storytelling and User Experience

As social media platforms and websites become oversaturated with ads (5.3 trillion each year!), consumers have been using ad blockers and new privacy options from Apple and Google to phase them out. Consumers want something real and want to trust the business they give their money to. The best way to create organic engagement while breaking through the monotony of digital ads is through storytelling. Stories are memorable and attention-grabbing, but they also provide a way to showcase the human element behind your brand.

To maximize the impact of your storytelling, provide a stellar user experience. Most customers will gladly pay more for better customer service, while 80% would switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience. Focusing on improved user experience can inspire brand advocates to showcase their positive experience with your brand.

Today’s Content Marketing

There are several different types of content, from written word and infographics to audio and video that can support your marketing strategy. For example, written word content can be blog posts, white papers, email newsletters, and even books. All these forms can improve your search engine ranking through search engine optimization (SEO).

Visual content like infographics, short-form video content, and humorous memes offer a unique way to quickly (and organically) engage with your target audience. Infographics can quickly convey a lot of information by utilizing bullet points and numbers rather than long-form written content. In contrast, short-form video content appeals to society’s short attention spans. Good quality video content is helpful when deciding on a purchase, with 71% of consumers purchase after watching a brand’s videos.

Benefits of Quality Content

Quality content goes beyond SEO and search engine rankings, although those are important. While some may think ads are the way to go with online marketing, 7 out of 10 consumers like learning about brands through article-type content. Consistently posting quality content can create long-term benefits like improving brand image and building trust with your consumer base.

Informative blog posts should answer important questions about your brand and products without coming off as a sales pitch. With 90% of buyers finding custom content useful, it makes sense to prioritize content in your marketing strategy.

Content for Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey

Like different influencers and ads target various audiences, content should also be tailored to the different stages in a buyer’s journey. The first stage, awareness, is when a buyer is experiencing a problem and is looking to solve it. The consideration stage is where they’re putting in the effort to research whether your product or service is the answer to their problem. Finally, the decision stage is where the potential customer settles on their solution.

Creating custom content to cater to each stage in a buyer’s journey can guide them through your sales funnel. In the awareness stage, blog posts, whitepapers, and ebooks are beneficial, while comparison guides, case studies, and free samples are better suited for the consideration stage. Coupons, consultation offers, and free trials can help drive home conversion in the final decision stage.

Content marketing is key to capturing new customers. If you’d like to explore content marketing strategies for your brand, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re here to help!

3 Reasons Brands Should Be Using TikTok

Even at first glance, TikTok is a no-brainer for marketing, and brands are starting to notice. While the app does have a reputation as a social platform for younger generations—think Generation Z and even some older members of Generation Alpha—the truth is that TikTok appeals to people from all ages. Yes, that even includes Baby Boomers.

In fact, only 60% of the nearly one billion monthly TikTokers are Gen Z. Of the remaining, 30% are Generation X and Boomers. These adults are on TikTok for an average of 38 minutes per day. This alone is a great reason to use TikTok for your brand marketing. But there are a few other big reasons you may want to start using this platform. More

Understand Pet Owners Across Generations for Effective Marketing

Marketing in any industry requires a deep understanding of a brand’s target audience before creating campaigns and choosing distribution for those campaigns. One or two generations or cohorts comprise the target audience for many industries. When it comes to pet ownership, however, marketers must fully understand the preferences of all ages, from Generation Alpha to the Silent Generation.

Why? Because everyone loves their pets. Most are passionate about them. How they shop for their pets, however, is a different story. Each generation consumes information and shops in their own unique ways. Marketers also mustn’t overlook how the pandemic altered shopping habits, particularly online purchases.

Following are some tips for helping to understand how to speak to consumers and convert them. More

Social Media Trends to Embrace in 2022

In 2021, more than 72% of Americans used social media — an increase of more than 10 million people. These 240 million users spend an average of two hours and seven minutes on social media every day. It’s safe to say that as new platforms and features continue to emerge, even more people will jump on board.

Most of the social media trends we expect to see in 2022 are already here, as existing trends continue to pick up speed in 2022, and marketers continue to adopt these elements in larger numbers.

Though Baby Boomers hold more than $2.6 trillion in spending power and control 70% of all disposable income in the U.S., they are often overlooked by marketers, specifically when digital campaigns are created. That’s a lot of money that brands may be leaving on the table, and a massive cohort of shoppers left feeling ignored.

When 67% of Baby Boomers own smartphones and account for 59% of digital purchases, it’s clear that this generation is more technologically savvy than younger generations give them credit for. With brands and marketers continuing to ignore them, Baby Boomers have effectively taken matters into their own hands. That’s right; we’re now in the age of the “Granfluencer.” More

The Changing Face of TikTok

By the time TikTok burst on the U.S. scene in 2017, it already had a following due to its first iteration as an app called Musical.ly. Since then, it has overcome a long list of problems—including increased pressure from legislators and copycat features from long-standing social media giants—to become one of America’s fastest-growing social media companies. More

Influencer Marketing Strategies for All Generations

For years, well before adopting the moniker of influencer marketing, brands have sought endorsements from celebrities and people of note. Generations that came before Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alphas—notably Generation X and Baby Boomers—can also be swayed by the right message from the right person at the right time.

Influencer marketing has become the catchall term for certain types of celebrities, experts, thought leaders, bloggers, and content creators who use their online presence to affect a group of people’s purchasing choices. It is one of the fastest-growing brand-building strategies, nearly tripling in value to an estimated $9.7 billion in recent years.

To develop killer influencer marketing strategies for all generations, it’s essential to understand the formula of the message, influencer, place, and time most effective for each generation. More

Five Big CPG Trends We’ll See in the Next Five Years

We don’t always need a crystal ball to see the future. However, the current state of CPG marketing trends gives us a lot of information about how things are going and how we can expect them to develop over the coming years. Although disruption can happen and evolving technology has the power to divert the current path, we can see some solid trends that are sure to be around for a while. More

Finding Your Travel and Hospitality Brand’s Share of Voice in the Current Marketing Storm

If hotel reservations and airline ticket sales are any indication, the travel market has resurged with a vengeance. Coastal destinations have experienced a 42% increase in bookings over the summer of 2019, and mountain and lake resorts are up 44% over 2019.

With consumers clamoring for a vacation after a long eighteen months at home, the problem isn’t drumming up business for the travel market at all. So now, hospitality and travel brands must focus on how to be heard above all the noise, and as international travel destinations continue to open up, the buzz will only continue to grow.

How will you find your brand’s share of voice? More

What We’ve Learned About Consumer Trends So Far in 2021

There is little precedent to help us understand how COVID-19 might shape consumer trends, especially in light of the technology that has emerged since the last global pandemic event in 1918. Now that the end of the tunnel is in sight, we’re gathering data at a lightning pace to understand the emerging trends expected through 2021 and beyond. More