What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the long-term process of creating and distributing valuable content to build an audience and drive profitable customer action. The valuable content can be in the form of text, images, videos, or audio.
In other words, content marketing is the art of delivering relevant content to attract and acquire potential customers.
According to Hubspot, 82% of marketers have content marketing in their marketing strategy and only 4% of B2B marketers don’t have a content marketing strategy, reports CMI.
Purpose of content marketing
Understand why content marketing is such a big deal:
- To create brand awareness
- To attract potential customers
- To educate your audience about your products and services
- To collect leads and boost conversions
- To build trust and develop relationships
- To improve the search engine rankings
- To establish brand authority
- To answer your audience’s questions
Benefits of content marketing
Instead of talking about your product directly, educating the potential customers about something that you sell makes your audience intelligent. And ultimately it’s your business that gets rewarded.
Here are some direct and indirect benefits of content marketing:
Better search visibility
There are tons of content on almost every topic, but they are still not enough. Most of the content online is not valuable enough. And if you create valuable content, it attracts backlinks, and that ultimately improves the search engine rankings.
It’s simple, more quality content means high chances of search engines discovering your content and ultimately better search visibility.
More traffic
The more of your content people see while browsing social media, YouTube, and while Googling about things, the higher will be chances of them coming to your website or app.
Also, if you manage to rank your content in search engines that a lot of people search for, it keeps driving you tons of traffic consistently. The same goes for Youtube.
Social media is a little bit different, the content posted on the social platforms brings a considerable amount of traffic in the first 24-48 hours only. After that, the old posts almost stop bringing any traffic. However, you always have the option to keep posting frequently, maybe even a few times a day.
More leads
It’s all related and simple, the more traffic comes to your website or app, the more time people are going to see the call-to-action (CTA), and the more leads you will be able to collect.
If your content is valuable, the readers are already hooked in a way and they are more likely to subscribe. Also, content marketing brings higher quality leads.
Improved conversions
Before people buy something from you, they like to know how it’s going to be. And posting high-quality content across different platforms helps them understand your authority on the subject and that results in better conversions.
Your content educates your audience and answers any questions that they might have before making the buying decision.
Brand awareness
Content gives your audience something to talk about.Moz
Content marketing helps bring your brand in front of thousands of people. If they see your brand popping up frequently in the search and social media, they tend to remember the brand.
And what’s the best form of marketing other than people themselves discussing your brand!
The rule of 7 is still a relevant concept in marketing that states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place.B2B Marketing
Better SEO
SEO can’t be done without some form of content marketing.
Content and backlinks are two main things that SEO depends on. Creating more high-quality content attracts more backlinks from fellow content writers and that ultimately makes your website more powerful and rank higher in the search engines.
There would be rarely a website where there are tons of pages of content but it doesn’t get traffic from search engines.
Clear brand personality
No, branding is not just about the logo and a color palette. It’s all about who you are, how you operate, your vision, mission, values, your commitment, and ethics.
And, content marketing successful educates your potential customers about who you really are and what your intentions are. It creates a clear personality for your brand.
Types of content marketing
Possible types of content that you can use to market your products and services:
1. Blog posts
Among all the written forms of content, blog posts are probably the #1 and bring the best ROI.
They provide you with the freedom of explaining the topic to your audience with as much as detailed you can be.
2. Videos
Videos are the future!
With the rising growth of YouTube and other video platforms, one can easily say that video content is going to be the future of content marketing.
Probably, video content takes more effort to create but returns on the investment are higher too.
3. Social media
No, you can’t count out social media when talking about content marketing. With little or low effort, social media can bring tons of traffic and leads.
Social media content can be in text, video, or image/graphic format.
4. Podcasts
Podcasts are around for years, but they have become increasingly popular in recent years. They give the listeners the freedom to consume quality content while doing unproductive works like driving, gardening, walking, etc.
5. Infographics
Infographics are great to display data and information in an easy-to-understand way. They can be posted on social media as well as on the blog, just the dimension and orientation of the infographic may vary.
Final words
While creating valuable content seems like a difficult thing to do, the returns that people see are amazing.
A single form of content can be repurposed into other forms and distributed on multiple platforms. For example, a blog post can be repurposed into podcasts, videos, infographics, and posted on multiple platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, Reddit, and Quora.
