What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is about creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain your own ‘audience’, with the view to them buying your goods or services.
Instead of directly pitching your goods and services, you create content / information that helps and is valuable to your potential buyers, they in turn can see that you can help solve their ‘problem’, and they will see the benefit that you can provide, and reward you with their business and loyalty.
80% of small businesses do not invest in content marketing – they are missing out on a key marketing opportunity – don’t be one of them!
What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Content?
Increased sales
Cost savings on paid advertising
Better customers who are more loyal
SEO benefits for your website
Good Content Is Vital For All Types Of Marketing
Creating good content – should be part of the process in any marketing you do – whether that be social media marketing, content on your website, PPC adverts etc
How Does It Work?
Essentially you want content to get visitors to your website to turn those visitors to leads – brand awareness. You want content to show opportunities to those leads – lead conversion and nurturing, and you want content to turn those opportunities in to sales – those visitors have been converted in to customers – customer conversion.
When you have made a sale – you need to make sure your customer is satisfied – customer service, you then need content to help with customer retention and loyalty, you then need good content to upsell to those existing customers and to convert them in to passionate subscribers – your raving fans who will recommend you to others.
What Content is Required?
There are many different types of content that can be marketed, including:
• Blogging / Articles
• Video
• Podcasting
• Infographics
• Email
• Images / Photos
• Ebooks
• Lead magnets
• Whitepapers
• Slideshare presentations
• Quizzes/tools
• Checklists
• Courses
• Webinars
• Slide decks
• Free apps
• Social media posts
And more – essentially anything that provides information or entertainment to your audience, that supports your business goal – whether that is driving traffic, spreading brand awareness, building relationships or generating social shares and backlinks.
What you are reading now is content marketing!
Resources:
Wikipedia’s definition of Content Marketing
How Can You Help With Marketing My Content?
JSP Web Design can help in many ways with your content marketing including:
- content marketing strategy
- creating content
- advising on content type suitable for your business
- choosing a format that works best for your business
- advising on content formats your potential customers already use
- where to target your audience
- finding gaps in the market
- branching out
- repurposing content
