Content Marketing
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience to drive profitable customer action.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
- It focuses on owning the media, rather than just borrowing it. It hence becomes a more reliable and consistent approach to engaging with your potential customers.
- It enhances your social media strategy, even promoting social selling through links within the content.
- It helps your SEO and results in you ranking higher in the search engine results as they reward you for authentic, creative and quality content.
- It is a considerate as well as successful PR strategy as it also lets you address the readers’ issues rather than just promoting your business.
- It creates content that drives inbound traffic and conversion of leads into sales.
The Business Advantage of Good Content Marketing
Unlike other approaches, there is something special that makes content marketing stand out as the best of modern marketing methods: It’s sustainable.
When done well – with a strategy behind it and relevancy within each piece – it offers the benefit of exponential growth, building brand awareness and trust, winning over prospects and convincing leads, and endearing your customers, helping to build a loyal base of brand advocates.
Once you get your content marketing strategy going, it’s that positive snowball effect in action. Your brand presence gets bigger and more impactful. It becomes easier to achieve your marketing goals with future content because you already have a foundation in place – a vast content library of written, visual, and experiential content, all designed to resonate with your target buyers.
This is in contrast to traditional marketing. Advertising, even with today’s sophisticated digital ads, can create overexposure. Audiences become saturated with brand promotion that offers no genuine value to the people you’re trying to build customer relationships with.
Content Strategy: Your Foundation for Everything Marketing
Back to the starting question of what is content marketing, it’s often called a strategy. It is and must be based on a strategy. It all comes down to purpose – the questions why, who, how, and where.
You’re probably already aware that it’s a must-have; otherwise, you don’t have a vision or any way to know if it’s working. What you can be sure of, now and in the future, is that your content strategy must be nimble.
If you are just now creating a strategy or revisiting it now due to the pandemic, follow these crucial steps.
- Define your mission, purpose, and goals: Who is your audience, what is your purpose in improving their lives, and what do you want to accomplish?
- Understand your audience: You need to flesh out your buyer personas so you know what challenges them and motivates them. It’s more than just demographics; it’s preferences and what matters to them. This is certainly an area to reconsider right now.
- Determine your priorities: In this step, you need to determine what content formats and channels should be a priority based on audience preferences. Remember, you need to publish content continuously, so these steps get you to a place where you’re establishing how you’ll do this.
- Work out the details: The previous steps set up parameters. Now it’s time to get a plan of action ready, defining the essentials like keywords, topic generation, social media usage, promotions related to big moments for your brand or industry (i.e., industry events or new product rollouts), and creating a publishing process.
- Start executing and creating content: With all the pieces in place, it’s now time to execute your strategy. If you’ve hammered out all the necessary parts of your strategy, you have the framework in order.
These steps aren’t rigid. You can go back to each one as needed, depending on what’s happening. In that time, you can also discover channels or areas where you can innovate.