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What Is Content Marketing?

Today I wanted to talk about what is content marketing. 

Do you know what it is?  Do you know how it started?  Do you even know why you should be incorporating it into your business?

You might think that content marketing started when the internet did but it has been around for years.  In various forms since the beginning of marketing and advertising. You’ve seen content marketing in commercials, television shows, movies, and even in magazines via “advertorials.”

For content marketing you’re creating and distributing valuable, relevant, attractive, and consistent content to your community. 

What’s powerful and special about content marketing today is that you can distribute content marketing materials online basically for free.  Love this.  You don’t have to pay money for Facebook, Google, Pinterest or Bing ads – you definitely can, but you don’t have to.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy.

So what are some examples of content marketing? 

Take a look below at some popular content marketing strategies: 

• Blogging
• Email Autoresponder Messages
• Videos and Webinars
• Case Studies and Interviews
• eBooks, eReports, and White Papers
• Checklists and Cheat Sheets
• Social Media Posts and Updates
• Infographics, GIFS, Memes, and Images

Content marketing is supposed to have a goal.  It doesn’t always have to be to buy a product but you’ll want to always want to be thinking of AIDA which stands for – Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

Some content marketing will have one, two or even three of these all in one action.

Attention could be a social media post, but in that same post you add a link to an opt-in so that is also desire and action (clicking to another site).

Your job when using content to market is to help people find you, express interest in your products and eventually buy from you.

When you practice effective content marketing, you will create and distribute content that matches your goals that you set for each piece of content based on where the customer is in the buying journey.

Having this knowledge about your audience and your products will make your content marketing efforts more effective.

What are your goals?  Have you thought about it?  Not sure what types of goals to make?

Here are some examples of content marketing tactics:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing solution awareness and knowledge
• Driving targeted traffic to your website
• Building your email list with interested members
• Generating more sales
• Converting more leads to customers
• Drive upselling
• Improving retention
• And more

You’ll determine the goal for the piece of content, and you’ll note the ideal audience you want to target and where they are in their buying cycle before you even start creating the titles, adding keywords, and developing the content.

Finally, you’ll need to know where to distribute the content. That will again depend on the goals you’ve set for the content, as well as who the content is meant for based on their buying journey. 

Yes, this takes longer but it’ll get easier as you practice doing it and then all of your content is going to work together and not feel disjointed or have no clear message.

~April

P.S. Did you know that we offer social media posts in most of our content bundles and Canva Social Media Image Templates on popular topics? Both of these options are easy to incorporate into your social media tactics.

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