The term “content marketing” is frequently thrown around by marketers, influencers and business owners, but what does it actually mean? Let’s kick off with a quick definition before we take a closer look at this concept.
Content marketing is a service that provides valuable and relevant content assets that form part of an overall marketing strategy. A strong content marketing strategy will combine the creativity and expertise of your team with the strategic business goals you have set for your organisation and help to attract new customers to your brand.
The perfect content marketing process will use SEO, Digital PR and creativity, as well as sector and audience-specific knowledge. Using this know-how and thorough research, you will generate amazing ideas that are then transformed into compelling content; converting strangers into audience members, audience members into fans and then fans into customers!
For many companies, especially those just starting out, content marketing will simply involve a website, a blog and any social media profiles they’ve set up. If this sounds familiar to you, you are not alone; many established businesses and market leaders are treating content in the same way. However, you should be aware that the tides have turned and even market leaders and corporate brands are now looking for unique and innovative content marketing approaches that will make them stand out from the crowd.
Blogs are important for building positive rankings for your top keywords in the SERPS, but content marketing has a much wider scope than simply producing a regular written blog. In fact, it refers to any information that is presented to an audience outside your company. Here’s a shortlist you can use to consider the options for your next content marketing campaign if you are struggling to look beyond your blog:
- Infographics and images
- White papers
- Videos
- Checklists and guides
- Downloadable worksheets
- Training courses
- Social media posts, GIFs and memes
- Interactive tools and games
- Podcasts
- Media interviews
- Case studies and testimonials
- E-books, books and audiobooks
There’s more we can add to this, too.
Discovering the range of options available to you for the first time can be exciting if you are new to digital marketing. Whenever a client hasn’t thought of the options above and beyond a basic blog, it is all the more exciting to capture their imagination with approaches to content marketing that they may never have thought of before.
What Is the Point of Content Marketing?
Now that we have a collection of new tactics and approaches to consider, we need to understand the purpose of your content marketing if you are going to deliver tangible results.
Typically, the aim of your content marketing is to deliver one, or several, of the following goals for your business:
- grow your audience with new and relevant potential customers
- help people to know, like and trust you and your business
- entertain, engage or educate your existing audience
- move your prospects closer to purchasing from you
- complete conversions
- retain your relationship with existing clients and turning them into long-term ambassadors of your company.
In order to achieve this, your content marketing should include a range of techniques that are tailored to you, your business and, most importantly, your audience. Once you understand what content works for all three groups, it becomes much simpler to decide which formats will drive the best return on your investment and which projects are likely to capture the imagination in other ways.
What Does Content Marketing Mean to Your Business?
Content marketing can mean a lot of things, but if you want to succeed, you need to be consistently providing compelling information to your audience.
Your goals, target audience and messaging will determine the best kinds of content for you to produce, but the most important things to remember are:
- entertain, educate or engage your audience with every piece of content
- prioritise the content that will appeal to your audience
- help your audience to know, like and trust you and your business.
Provided you have taken the time to understand your audience and the content that they will find most useful properly, you should be able to tailor their experience of your website to suit them. Once you are achieving this consistently, you will be able to rely upon content marketing as a great way to drive traffic and leads into your business.
If you’re still stuck for inspiration and looking for a new approach to content marketing, take a look at our Complete Guide To Content Marketing whitepaper.
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