What is content marketing?
Everyday business owners are creating 100’s of different pieces of content to market their brand. Whether you know it or not, you are likely to have some form of content marketing strategy in place that helps keep you visible and searchable. The content might be a weekly email, regular social posting days or monthly blog posts. But in order for this content to play an effective part in your marketing strategy a structured plan is essential.
Having a consistent planned approach ensures your customers are being provided with specific, valuable, regular and engaging content, and it also takes away that overwhelmed feeling when don’t know what to communicate and you’re floundering around for things to post and share.
So, what is content marketing?
Content marketing is the planning, creation and distribution of valuable content, to attract your target audience and ultimately convert to sales.
It has 4 forms:
Written
Audio
Video
Images
Content in whichever form should align with one of four themes:
Brand: This shows what the brand is about by showing the person behind the brand, your values, things you’re involved with.
Community: Showcasing and curating things you know your audience will enjoy from other relevant businesses or user-generated content.
Value: Sharing tips, hints, insights with your audience you know they will find value from.
Sales: When you have a specific product, service, event to sell and creating content to promote that with a clear call to action
When you are planning your content, consciously think about which of the themes does it fall into. If you are just focusing on ‘Sales’ type content, you’re unlikely to generate and attract an engaged audience, with people feeling consistently sold to. However, if you include a mix from the four themes, it will mean that when you do post a sales-type post it won’t jar as much and will be more warmly received.
Why bother with content marketing?
Content marketing has many benefits for your brand and consumers:
It builds relationships between your brand and consumers
It boosts brand trust
It leads to more website traffic
It educates consumers about the products/services you offer
It shows your audience how your products/services solve a problem they experience
All these factors can lead to increased brand awareness, reach, sales and loyalty (yippee).
Types of content marketing?
There are many different types of content marketing that can be used to complement your marketing strategy. Popular types include:
Social Media
Social media marketing involves posting a host of content including images, text, videos or audio on social media platforms, to connect with your audience. It’s called ‘social’ media for the reason it should be used to engage, discuss and share. It shouldn’t be seen as a one-way street and used to solely post about your products or services.
Blogs
Blog writing is a type of inbound marketing used to get your business more visibility online, by writing valuable and informative articles. These could go on your own website or be a guest blog for another, relevant business. It often goes hand in hand with social media marketing and can really help with search and where you appear in search engines.
Podcasts
Growing in popularity, podcasts are a great marketing tactic to target a niche audience and create value as they are often educational and informative, focusing on particular topics. They can be combined with video and used multi-channel. Although the cost of equipment has reduced considerably, it does require time and effort to produce something of quality that will cut through a very crowded market.
Video
Video has long been hailed the king/queen of content, and with Instagram recently declaring itself a video platform, this looks only set to increase. Whether you create video to incorporate on your website to showcase the brand, host a live chat on Facebook, or start using TikTok as part of your marketing strategy, always go back to what the purpose of the content will be, who is it aimed at, which content pillar is it addressing and how will you share it so people can see it.
Content marketing is part of the long game of building brand awareness, engagement and a loyal customer base. Yes, you might create a piece of content that goes viral and has an immediate impact but by remaining consistent in delivering entertaining, educational and valuable content as part of an ongoing strategy, the benefits will be much longer-term and sustained.
For more help with your content marketing strategy download our free content marketing planning guide.