Digital marketing is a powerful and varied tool.

Every business now has ways to put themselves in front of their audience – from digital display ads and Facebook retargeting, to PPC, SEO and buying influencers. Yet these marketing methods will significantly eat into your budget and will also fail to give you the ROI you deserve – unless you involve content.

So content marketing has become essential for any digital campaign.

Not only because it’s a reliable and cost-effective way of engaging your target audience. But without it your marketing is in danger of missing out on the following:

1. Emails that give you 3,800% ROI

Yes, that’s right. Research undertaken by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) in the UK showed that the average ROI for email marketing is around GBP 38 for every one pound spent – with one in five companies reporting a massive ROI of over GBP 70. Consider this in line with the fact that 73% of UK consumers rate email as their preferred marketing channel, and that implications for the UAE are clear.

You are missing out if you don’t use email content as part of your digital marketing efforts.

So, what do we mean by email content?

Well, it means sending emails to your subscribers and customers that are as fresh and exciting as possible, and providing them with content that’s relevant and useful. This will not only ensure your content avoids going straight to trash, but will also reward you with clicks through to your blog posts, videos, and web pages.

And further strengthen the customer relationship with your brand.

How you can use email to boost your marketing ROI

You don’t have to restrict yourself to sending links to blog posts. In fact, studies have found that welcome messages and customer surveys are in the top three ways of achieving digital marketing campaign objectives. However, newsletters remain a clear favourite and are still seen as the most effective way of sending out email content.

Your strategy should be to supply useful and relevant content that focuses on solving customer problems, offers timely advice, and adds value to your audience’s lives in a way that’s authentic and not intrusive. Most brands favour sending out email content somewhere between two and five times per month.

2. Social media with substance

These days people rely on social networks to discover, research, and educate themselves about a brand before engaging with that organisation. So they will be looking out for indicators of who you are and what you might be able to offer them.

While approximately 65% of US companies with over 100 employees have been shown to use social platforms like Twitter for marketing, we see far too many brands who get this all wrong. Either they set up an account and think their work is done; they rely on repetitive (automated) posts, or simply share third-party information. Nothing original or engaging.

All of which is arguably worse than not having a social media account at all, because it showcases your lack of enthusiasm and thinking, and suggests your brand has nothing to offer.

Without unique and well-crafted content, your social media marketing has no substance. If you want people to follow and engage with you, give them a reason to.

How you can use great content to build your audiences on social

Create your own relevant and interesting content to share and your social media will shine. Using third-party content can be useful, but your own insightful articles will be more powerful in gaining likes, shares and new followers among your target customers. Share these regularly and you may even earn a reputation as a thought leader.

Don’t only focus on linking to content elsewhere though. Some of the most successful brands have built huge followings on their ability to write useful, interesting or funny content within the posts themselves – actively engaging with their audience, peers, and even competitors for maximum exposure (it’s called ‘social’ media, after all).

3. New and bigger audiences with media syndication

We’ve talked about the benefits of syndicating your content before. This is where (for example) an article or infographic you wrote and published on your own website has been seen by an interested third-party, and they liked it so much they want your approval to republish it on their platform.

For many companies, this represents the pinnacle of great marketing.

Not only because the brand has created a position for itself where peers or other interested readers are paying attention. But because it now has an incredible opportunity to get in front of new and bigger audiences it might not otherwise have reached. That could be another more popular website, in an industry magazine, or even in a newspaper.

And, quite simply, this is impossible to achieve without content.

How you can extend your reach through the mainstream media

Create topical content that will strike a chord with people in your industry. Steer clear of self-promotion and keep it educational. Then do your homework on the best publications for your work, making sure their audience matches your own.

Above all, ensure your work is insightful, interesting, and flawless – editors will be looking for pieces that need the least work (it defeats the point of syndication if they have to revise it too much).

If you don’t have the skills in-house to achieve this, outsource to professional writers and designers for the best results. But make sure that the insight and thinking itself comes from your team, because they are the topic experts after all.

Content is the key to the success of your digital marketing

While other digital marketing tools will blow your budget, content marketing is a cost-effective way of getting the best ROI possible. Not only through engaging your audience on their favoured marketing channel, and allowing them to follow and interact with you on social media, but also by giving you the opportunity to maximise your audience through media syndication.