Content Marketing 101: What Is It And How To Use It To Your Advantage
Marketing your business online is essential, which is why it is important to have multiple pillars in your digital marketing strategy. In this article, we dive deeper into the world of content marketing, what it is, how to use it and why it should be a strong part of your digital strategy.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing technique that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a targeted audience. The overall goal for any marketing strategy is to drive profitable customer action and content marketing is no different. Creating content that is valuable and uniquely curated for your target audience, makes the investment worthwhile, and conversions much more likely.
What are the different types of content marketing?
There are many different initiatives that your brand can implement - from blog posts and guest posting to infographics, ebook and white papers. Some people often include social media marketing under the content umbrella, however, as it is such a huge topic on its own, we like to imagine social media marketing as a different pillar of the complete digital strategy.
Blog Posts - A fantastic way to create and share longer, in-depth content that adds value to your audience. Blog content also helps to build authority, credibility and your status as an industry thought leader.
Guest Posts - Guest posting can go both ways, either you create content for another website, or, you have a third party create content to be hosted on your own platform. Guest blogging and partnerships are also great to help your content reach a new, extended audience beyond your own network. You can read more about guest blogging here
Infographics - A great way to create content in a visual format that can be shared across platforms and has potential to go viral. Infographics are a great form of content marketing that can be distributed via social platforms. Infographics are easy to consume, less overwhelming than an in-depth white paper and is appealing to the eye.
Ebooks - If you want to give your audience some serious value, create an ebook to deliver a lot of information on a specific topic that is consumed in a user-friendly way. Ebooks also work as an email opt-in to help build your subscriber list for email marketing - another pillar of your digital strategy.
What is the benefit of content marketing?
While there are a number of ways content marketing can take shape, there’s just as many benefits that come with implementing a content centric strategy. Some of the benefits of are that it:
establishes a backlog of owned media that can be shared, repurposed and used across platforms over time
ensures you have consistent content that gives your loyal followers something to engage with
adds value to your audience
builds authority, credibility and status as an industry thought leader
gives your content potential to go viral and reach an audience beyond your own network
encourages opportunities for collaboration and partnerships
supports your social media, email marketing, PR and SEO strategies
drives new leads to the sales funnel
assists with customer retention
How to get started!
Starting a content marketing strategy is more simple than you might first think. For instance, starting a blog on your website and work on creating weekly content is the perfect starting point. Once you have a blog up and running you can go further to create your first downloadable e-product such as an ebook, gift guide or a meal plan, depending on your area of interest and expertise. Having already established a following on your blog, you have the opportunity to share your e-products there, as well as distribute the content via your other owned platforms.
Once you start linking all the different forms of content marketing together and trying different approaches, the rest almost fall into place. Then it is time to start optimizing and adapting to ensure your content is working hard for you once you set it free on the world wide web.
