Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and Distibution relevant, valuable, and consistent content to attract and clearly defined audience. Instead of pitching services and product, a strategic content driven approach provides relevant and useful content to your prospect and customers to solve them issues in their works or personal lives.
Why use content marketing
Today marketing is impossible without content.
Content should be integrated into your marketing process, not treated as something separate. Quality content is part of all form of marketing. Including:
Email marketing:
Email marketing is when business uses email to communicate and connect with their customer base. This is a form of direct marketing used to inform customers, increase brand awareness, and promote specific products and services.
Social media marketing:
Social media marketing is the use of social media the platforms on which users build social networks and share information to build a company brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
Inbound marketing:
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to creating valuable content that aligns with the needs of your target audiences and inspires long term customers relationships. Yours customers are your customers because you provide solution to their problems. That is what inbound marketing is all about- providing the solutions that your target audiences are searching for.
Digital marketing:
Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.
What is the basic principle, tactics and terms of content marketing
Like other forms of digital marketing, content marketing involves the strategic use of engaging high-quality content. However, content marketers use content to serve the distinct purpose outlined above. Rather than replacing techniques like traditional marketing public relations, or search engine optimization, content marketing is most effective when it’s applied in tandem with them.
Though content marketing shares many of the same tactics and terminology used in other marketing disciplines, they need to be viewed and applied through a different lens.
How content marketing support the bottom line and customer’s need
Wouldn’t it be great if your customers looked forward to receiving your marketing? What if when they received it (whether through print, email and social channels, your blog, or website), they spent time engaging with it? What if they anticipated it and shared it with their peers?
Go back and read the definition one more time. Notice the phrase “relevant and valuable”. That’s the difference between strategic content and informational spam sent by companies trying to sell first rather than help first.
When business create excellent content, they can expect one or more of these four benefits:
1: Increased sales
2: Cost savings
3: Better customers who have more loyalty
4: Content-driven revenue
What makes a successful content marketing strategy?
A successful content marketing strategy is not one that jumps on the latest brand journalism trends. It is one that has a clear goal and a focused target audience. You see, if your content doesn’t cater to the right people with the right problem [ that your product solves], then it’s likely you’ll end up wasting your content marketing effort. Start outlining what you want to achieve with your brand journalism efforts. It could be rising brand awareness, require email addresses, or increase conversion rates.
Next, define exactly whom you want to target. For example, my brand journalism efforts are targeted at marketers and entrepreneurs who have business that operate predominantly online and who want to learn more about increasing traffic to their websites and generating more online revenue.
Finally, write a clear plan about how to will achieve your goal.
If you want to increase email subscribers, for instance, your content plan may be to create an eBook, write a landing page for the eBook, and then create a series of blog posts and emails that drive traffic to that landing page. Your plan should highlight who will create each piece of content, when it will be written, an where it will be posted.
Awareness stage for content marketing
The first stage of buyer’s journey is awareness.
They aren’t necessarily ready to buy yet or even ready to opt in to your email list or newsletter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t offer value by creating content around broad topics and solving their problem. Why is that valuable to your business? Because by creating content that solves people’s problem, you help them to discover and trust your brand. And then in the future when they are ready to buy, you’ll be on the first people they think of. If you want to be successful at creating content for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, then pay attention to the most important content marketing metrics. These include measuring:
1: Users, pages views and unique views to understand brand awareness.
2: Click-through rates, bounce rates, social shares, comments, social mentions, time on site,
3: Page and domain authority for SEO.
4: Demo requests, sales conversion rates, and sales cycle length, for understanding sales enablement rates.
Blog is not the only medium you can use for top-of-funnel brand journalism. Social media is another great way to build brand awareness.
Conclusion
Phew! That was a lot of tips.
Hopefully, this article gives you an idea of what content marketing is and what it takes to be a good content marketer. What’s more, I really hope that you see that it doesn’t take a huge marketing budget. The worlds get noisier each day, and one way to stand out is through creative brand journalism that gets people talking and sharing.
What’s more, I really hope that you see that it doesn’t take a huge marketing budget. The worlds get noisier each day, and one way to stand out is through creative brand journalism that gets people talking and sharing.
If you have any great examples I’ve missed, please tell me about them in the comments.