If you are new to marketing you may be wondering…
Exactly What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is not an invention that started just when the internet took off. It’s been around in various forms since the beginning of marketing and advertising. You’ve seen this type of marketing in commercials, television shows, movies, and in magazines via “advertorials.”
Basically, content marketing is simply creating and distributing valuable, relevant, attractive, and consistent content to your audience. The goal is to persuade those who consume the content to act on your calls to action.
In today’s online world, you can distribute content marketing materials online basically for free. Yay! You don’t have to pay money for an advertorial or even pay to promote your posts if you don’t want to. Of course you can pay for ads but you don’t have to.
Using content to get information to your audience is a long-term strategy that may include expenditures on content, but it doesn’t have to include any advertising fees at all because of the power of the internet.
Types of Content Marketing
A few examples of content marketing, as mentioned in our previous post, are:
- 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
Buying Cycle
When using content to market, it is your job to understand your ideal customers’ buying cycle. The basic buying cycle includes awareness, consideration, and decision. Most marketers like to add more to the buying journey because there are many steps in each of the three basic steps of the buying cycle.
For example, they may list the buying cycle as awareness, research, consideration, purchasing, and retention instead. However, you decide how to define your customer’s buying journey. The more specific you are about where they are in their decision-making process or buying journey, the more targeted and effective your content marketing efforts will be.
Goals of Content Marketing
When you practice effective content marketing, you create and distribute content that matches the 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 marketing efforts more effective.
Some examples of content marketing goals include:
- 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
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.
So, hopefully I have answered the question and given you a few ideas as to how you might use it in your business.
In our next post, I will cover the basics of content marketing before we get into the details.
