Window shopping near Covent Garden, London
Physical stores – the brick-and-mortar kind – always prefer to select locations on street corners. Why? It provides greater window space and two main entrances which means double the opportunity to connect with prospective customers. The street corner is prime real estate.
Store front windows provide retailers with the opportunity to showcase their best wares – their high quality content. The more great content on display, and the more convincing it becomes to walk through the door, the more likely it becomes a hurried passerby might stop and browse.
And the longer they browse, the more likely they are to purchase. Who hangs around a store without making a purchase?
Starbucks is legendary for providing us an illustrative example. The company would often open new stores nearby existing stores. Many would question such a move arguing that placing additional stores so close to each other would cannibalize sales; but it doesn’t.
In the rush of a morning commute, pedestrians are more likely to glance in at a crowded Starbucks and decide to move on rather than stand in line for an expensive coffee. Concentrating new stores in one area improves the efficiency and creates more doors for potential customers to walk through.
It’s quite a project to open a new store – and create another door – but content marketing works in a similar fashion without the groundbreaking or ribbon cutting ceremonies. Content marketing creates more windows for potential customers to catch a glimpse of your products and services – and it creates more doors for them to walk through.
Every blog post written, every press release published, every YouTube video produced is another piece of content that will be indexed in search and point back to your site. For most blogs for example, search is still by far the top source of referral traffic. From every status update across Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, to every photo uploaded to Flickr, Instagram or Pinterest, to every video on YouTube or Vimeo, each piece of content is like creating another window or another door to your business online.
Note: this post was originally published on Business to Community.
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