What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is all about creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and engaging content. It’s a strategy brands use to attract, acquire, and retain customers. Although it’s not new, it has become more prevalent in recent years due to the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Content Marketing is…

Content marketing is a form of marketing in which companies create and distribute helpful, valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Content marketing is about telling stories that are interesting to your audience. When you tell a story on social media that people like or share because it resonates with them, it’s earned media (a promotion you didn’t have to pay for). You earned it by creating enjoyable content others want to read, watch or hear about. Many brands dream of going viral but creating long-lasting content that drives users for a long time to come tends to be a more meaningful strategy than a one-time viral boost.

What are Content Marketing Examples?

Content marketing is everywhere. A look through your social media feeds reveals dozens of posts from businesses trying to catch your attention. The best content marketers know how to grab you and keep you engaged with their posts. Creating the right type of content for your business can significantly improve conversions, sales, and leads.

Below are examples of content and what they should contain.

Social Media Posts

These should be short, snappy, and easy to read so that they don’t require too much time or effort from the reader before they scroll past them on their phone while waiting in line at Starbucks or riding on public transportation (or maybe even when they’re sitting down watching TV).

E-commerce Product Descriptions

When written by someone who understands both marketing and SEO principles (both essential elements in driving traffic), these often include detailed descriptions about why each product is special and any relevant information regarding size charts or fit models used during production. They are all designed to give shoppers confidence when making purchases online rather than going into stores where returns aren’t always possible without hassle (or additional fees).

Blog Posts

These are informative articles posted on your site. Before you choose topics, you should do topical and keyword research to ensure people are searching for what you’re writing about. Your posts should be engaging and educate the reader. It will help you to show your authority and teach others. People who value your expertise are more likely to become clients.

Guest Blogs

These are articles posted on other businesses’ sites to get links back to your own site. It also helps to get your brand name and your expertise out there and create interest in working with you. These posts will need to follow the guidelines of the websites and publications you submit them to, but when possible, you should as for a link back to your website and a bio.

Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing helps you build trust, relationships, and a community. It can also help you build brand awareness and authority and generate leads.

Having a content strategy in place will make things easier for your business because it will allow you to stay on track with what your audience needs, wants, and expects from you as an organization.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Specifically, there are four key reasons – and benefits – for enterprises to use content marketing:

Increased sales
Cost savings
Better customers who have more loyalty
Content as a profit center”

These really apply to all businesses, big and small.

How Can You Create a Useful and Informative Content Strategy?

If you want to create and publish useful and informative content for your audience, you should start by doing the following.

Create a content calendar. You’ll need a plan for when and how often you’re going to publish new content. For example, what days do you want new blog posts published? And will there be any exceptions? How often should those happen? Do you have enough time each day or week to create posts and get them live on time? If not, consider hiring freelance writers so that they can take care of the extra workload while still allowing yourself some time off.

Create a content strategy. Your strategy should include goals for long-term success as well as short-term objectives that lead towards these goals (e.g., increasing traffic). It also needs information about who your target audience is (e.g., age range), how much time it takes for people in this group—who don’t know much about your industry—to understand key concepts (e.g., how many words), and where this type of person hangs out online (e.g., social media channels). This way, when someone comes across one of your pieces today, tomorrow, or next week at some point down the line, they’ll find it easy enough to understand what’s being talked about without reading anything else beforehand.

Content Marketing Helps SEO and Lead Gen

Content Marketing helps improve search rankings, increase brand awareness and generate leads. It’s an investment that can pay off big time when you start measuring the results of your efforts.

Takeaways

Content marketing can be the perfect way to introduce your business to new customers. It’s a great way to provide useful, interesting and engaging content that helps people find what they need without feeling like they’re being sold anything.

Content Marketing is…