What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is all the rage at the moment. But what is content marketing?

According to contentmarketinginstitute.com:

Content marketing is 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.

Putting it a bit more simply, content marketing is about giving value.

Useful content that your audience can use to improve their life, their business, their skills, whatever it is that makes sense for your brand and your customers. The content you produce, whether it’s in the form of blog posts like this one, podcast episodes like this one, or videos on YouTube like this one, are a chance to:

• Tell your brand’s story.
• Connect with your audience/potential customers on a deeper, more meaningful level.
• Turn cold leads into warm leads and warm leads into buyers.
• Create loyal brand evangelists.
• Help solve your customer’s issues and start a cycle of reciprocation.

In fact, content marketing is at the core of most successful business’s marketing strategies today.

Businesses like Microsoft, Cisco, Wistia, and many more. These businesses use content marketing because it works.

In a world where consumers expect the marketing they see to be highly relevant and targeted, generic ads and the traditional approach don’t make much sense anymore.

But creating content is just the beginning. Your content marketing strategy has to have three components in order to really drive results for your business.

The 3 Key Factors

1. A successful content marketing strategy is a long term investment. It takes time to build up traffic, generate back links, and see the results from your efforts. The best content marketers realize that it takes time and stick with it for the long haul.
2. Consistency. Creating and publishing consistent content on a predictable schedule is key. This doesn’t mean you have to publish something new every week or even every two weeks, just often enough to have the desired impact.
3. Your content has to be diversified. You won’t know for sure what your audience will really respond to unless your content is varied and covers a lot of ground. You should be tracking which of your content is getting the most engagement over time and tailoring what you create based on that. Start wide and then laser in your focus.

The Best SEO Is Great Content

Quality content is the most important part of your overall marketing strategy. If you’re spending time and money on SEO, PPC, and social media posts, but are neglecting to make excellent, sharable content you’re not going to see the kinds of results you could be getting.

• SEO: The search engines want to present searchers with the most relevant results. Awesome, relevant, valuable content fits that description. Your content is also a great way to introduce a cold lead from a search engine to your brand.
• Social Media: Posting to Facebook and Twitter without creating content is a huge waste of time. People on social media want to consume and share interesting, emotional, entertaining, or educational content.
• PPC: For pay per click ads, whether they’re on Adwords or Facebook, you need quality content to point the click to. Remember what we talked about above with high relevant and targeted marketing? Your business’s home page isn’t nearly as effective as a piece of content that solve the searchers exact problem.
• Inbound: Content marketing is a key component to inbound marketing and generating leads and traffic.

For help with your content marketing, implementation of your blogs, increasing blog traffic, and social media efforts – know that we at Smooth Sailing Online Support have your back! Give us a call at 484-284-0933 or go to www.smoothbusinessgrowth.com.