Content Marketing: What Exactly is Content Marketing and Where Should You Start?

What comes to your mind when you hear the phrase content marketing? Some people link content marketing to Twitter, Facebook, blogs, or viral YouTube videos.

Well, content marketing has been in existence prior to the introduction of the internet. People have been telling stories for many decades as well as producing newsletters, magazines, pamphlets and other forms of content.

Since the term content refers to various information formats, the post will review what exactly content marketing is and where you should start.

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing refers to

“a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately to drive profitable customer action.”

Based on that definition, content marketing is a long-term strategy and focuses on establishing a strong relationship with an audience. To achieve that, a company has to provide them with high-quality, relevant content consistently.

Content marketing tells your customers that you care for them, and so when they purchase a product from you, their loyalty lies with you. Because people want to feel cared about, companies are even noisier and louder than some years back, and they do that using different types of content marketing strategies.

Why Content Marketing?

Many B2B and B2C businesses are using content marketing, and they have done that for hundreds of years. However, is content marketing what your business need?

B2C content creators want to create more engaging content and to understand what information is effective and what is not. Other priorities are creating visual content, ways to repurpose content and optimizing it. Here is how a sound content marketing strategy can help your business to grow.

Reputation, Authority, and Loyalty: The market funnel is the path each customer follows and is crucial in content marketing. Great content is valuable to customers, reaches a wider audience and builds a positive reputation for your brand. It helps to convince your potential customers that you’re a great brand in the market and should buy from you. A consistent generation and distribution of high-quality content to both new and existing customers increases their loyalty levels.

Better-informed Buyers: Creating high-quality content regularly keeps them informed. This is to your advantage because your sales team will not need to put much effort and time into explaining the features, benefits, or procedure of using your products or services.

Further, customers’ questions will keep you engaged and help you build a learning or resource centre fully equipped with eBooks, articles, videos and more.

Reach a Brand-New Target Audience: Content is beneficial to existing and potential customers searching for such information about your product or service. You can reach your target audience passively by generating easy-to-find content that appears in the search engine results. An active approach is when you distribute the content on different channels and actively stimulate readers to share with their connections.

Indeed, content marketing is extremely competitive today; however, there are more terrible videos, infographics and blog posts in the online environment. So don’t use the clutter as a reason not to generate content for your business. Here is how you can stand on top of this online noise.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Get a Briefer

So far, the article has given you a brief introduction of what content marketing is; however you need to delve deeper and get more details. For instance, you need to understand the beginning, middle and end of the life of your content. You should familiarize yourself with metrics of measuring the results, ROI and how to grow your business using content marketing.

Study Your Competitors

Research what other businesses with similar products are doing when it comes to content marketing. Look at their most popular articles, learn how often they publish them and their target audience.

The word of caution is never to copy your competitors’ strategy even if your businesses are almost similar. Instead, take inspiration from them and generate yours.

Set Publication Dates

In the beginning, your editorial calendar might not be the best; however, you will keep on making necessary adjustments with time.

So then, categorize your content into videos, infographic and articles, as well as how you plan to publish them. It’s important to note that your efforts will yield results if you’re consistent; otherwise, hit and miss will not produce any.

Set and Keep Your Goals

Indicate how many articles, infographics, and videos you will release per week or month and the results you want to see. Further, indicate where you want to be in the next 6 or 12 months, as well as the number of impressions you hope to achieve.

Also, keep on adjusting your goals based on the results of the published content and follow your vision.

Use Your First Posts to Test Waters

Whether you’re an experienced content creator or an amateur, your first couple of posts will not be as perfect as you may have intended them to be. However, don’t allow that to discourage you. In fact, view the first few posts as an experiment to help you learn how people react to your work. Then take note and then come up with a strategy on how you could do better.

Continue Publishing New Articles

At this point, you already know what your target audience wants and how they view your content. So continue generating appealing content for your target demographics and measure the results.

Engage your audience on social media channels, particularly those that comment or share your material. This will help you get questions and feedback that you can use to improve your next articles.

Keep Improving

Like experienced marketers, continue learning new things and improving your content marketing strategy. This will help you generate high-quality content and achieve better results.

Additionally, content marketing norms and trends keep on changing, and so should you. Your content should reflect what is happening in the industry, and if not, you will be among those cluttering the internet with mediocre articles or videos.

Summary

Nothing should stop you from launching your content marketing strategy now. However, time, discipline, dedication will help you generate high-quality content that will be valuable and appealing to your audience.

The post has given you a basic introduction to content marketing and how you should go about it. So now, craft a reasonable path to get there.