What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – to drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing is not about selling your product or services. It’s about providing useful information that will help your target audience make better decisions.
The goal is to generate awareness for your brand (i.e., people know you exist) and drive them towards taking action on a call-to-action (CTA), whether it’s signing up for an email newsletter, making a purchase, or requesting more information about your business services.
Why should you use content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy that helps you to reach your target audience. It helps you to increase brand awareness, improve traffic, and increase sales.
Content marketing is cost-effective in many ways. First, it doesn’t require a large investment in media advertising and promotion. Second, it can be used over and over again as long as there are updates or changes in the business model or organization structure.
Content marketing objectives
You now know why you should use content marketing. But, how do you go about creating the right kind of content?
The first step is to identify your objectives. To begin with, here are some examples of common objectives for content marketers:
- To grow brand awareness and loyalty among existing customers
- To generate leads for your sales team via email or calls from interested prospects
- To increase traffic to your website from search engines (SEO), social media platforms, and other external sites that link back to it
Content marketing goals
So what is the goal of content marketing? The answer is simple: to provide value to your audience to build trust and credibility, establish authority, boost brand awareness and drive traffic.
The result of all this effort? You’ll improve SEO; increase conversions; improve customer engagement; increase customer loyalty.
Content marketing vs digital marketing
Content marketing is a subset of digital marketing, which is itself a subset of advertising. Digital marketing tactics include SEO (search engine optimization), social media marketing, email marketing, PPC (pay per click), and other forms of online advertising.
Content marketers focus on creating and sharing content to attract and engage audiences. Content can take many forms: blog posts; ebooks; infographics; videos; white papers or case studies; even infomercials.
The goal is always the same: to tell your story in a way that builds trust with your target audience so they’ll become customers.
Content marketing process flow
The content marketing process flow is an important part of the process, as it helps you identify the steps needed to make sure your strategy is designed correctly.
To create a successful content marketing strategy, you need to have an understanding of where each piece fits into the whole. This will help you determine what goals you want to achieve and what tasks need to be completed for those goals to become a reality.
Here are some steps that can help guide your team:
- Developing a Content Marketing Strategy: This step involves developing a plan for how your company will use its resources (time, energy, and money) on creating content within their industry over time.
- Developing A Content Marketing Plan: After defining goals for your content marketing strategy, this step focuses on how those objectives will be achieved.
- Structuring Your Content Strategy: Once all of these elements have been established by defining processes and procedures around them; this step takes place.
- Implementing Your Content Marketing Processes And Procedures: At this stage in development it’s time for teams within businesses both large and small who are looking at implementing new practices would implement them into practice.
How to develop a content strategy?
Content marketing is a powerful way to build your brand and generate leads, but it’s not as simple as creating content and then publishing it. To get the most out of your strategy, you need a plan that includes:
- A strong editorial calendar
- Topic cluster pages
- Pillars that connect the different parts of your website together (such as FAQs)
To develop this content strategy, you should keep in mind that every part of your business—from marketing to product development—should work together in harmony. You don’t want one department working on its own thing while another department develops its own plan or goals; instead, everyone needs to be on the same page with their ideas and execution.
