Content Marketing: Everything You Need To Know

The term “Content Marketing” has slowly and undoubtedly gained momentum over the past years. Today, it’s an online marketing strategy many businesses heavily invest in.

For many new entrepreneurs entering the online space, this marketing concept may be, at times, confusing and hard to understand.

Given the immense popularity and effectiveness, this post will explain what content marketing is, how it will impact your business and the most popular types of content marketing channels.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is about utilising and distributing valuable content for scalable business growth. Different companies practice content marketing in various ways.

The reason for this is, is because every business is marketing to a different target market. Each market will react and engage with each marketing more or less effectively.

For example, there is no point in tweeting up a storm on Twitter if your consumers are primarily conversing and interacting on Facebook. Your content marketing campaign will fail, and your budget will be wasted.

Instead, what is important, is to research and understand as much about your target market as possible before starting a campaign. This ensures you are appealing to the right people through the right platforms.

Content marketing purpose and objectives

Providing your audience with content of value is at the heart of what content marketing is about. Your content will likely be created to either educate, inform or entertain.

All three approaches will work to serve and achieve the same end result: to provide your customer with actual value in the information you are supplying.

For every piece of content you have distributed across the web; you are essentially providing prospects with another great reason why they should choose you over your competitor. This ultimately allows your business to stand out from the endless crowd in the online marketplace.

In other words, you’re setting yourself apart and distinguishing your business as one that believes in engaging with customers. Your content marketing strategy should provide genuine worth that triggers a sense of pleasure and enjoyment.

Content marketing strategies aren’t aimed at selling something to customers – however, what they are designed to do is inform audiences about the specifics of your business to make sure that they’re able to make more informed choices (i.e. by picking you), or to entertain and engage them.

A well developed content marketing strategy is supposed to do both, and the result is always the same: customers start trusting you as a business and you as a brand because you’ve given them all the information they wanted. They like you because you’ve given them actual worth.

They’ll happily complete a transaction once they’re all set to buy something.

How content marketing is different from traditional marketing

Content marketing is different from regular marketing in two fundamental ways. First, information resides on owned or earned media. If there’s any media buyout involved, it’s traditional marketing, not content marketing.

Secondly, content marketing is a pull, not a push. Content doesn’t interrupt; it blends and attracts.

How content marketing aligns with SEO

Without good content, you will struggle to make your SEO strategy useful. All successful businesses create quality content for their clients. They do so by either publishing content on their website or distributing it via various popular online sources. To name a few, we have Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Slideshare and Instagram.

In addition to that, the quality of your website’s content highly determines your search engine positions, especially with Google. After the Hummingbird update, Google started giving high importance to the content. This fact alone stresses that SEO success highly depends on the quality of content you have on your website.

Although content marketing and SEO are two entirely different marketing phenomena, this does not mean that they work alone. Combining the two techniques helps you rank higher in search engines and gain better traffic.

Your business can improve its marketability by writing content for search engines and humans. Whenever creating a content marketing strategy, you must keep SEO firmly in mind.

For expert guidance on how to best get the best from both channels, we recommend speaking to an experienced SEO agency.

How content marketing can benefit your business

Content marketing can prove to be a serious game-changer for your business. Although this kind of marketing offers several advantages (most of which are tough to monitor), there are three key benefits you should know about:

• Generating natural link popularity
• Building brand awareness through engagement
• Generating quality organic traffic to your website

Here are some other ways content marketing helps your business:

• Content marketing allows you to make a personal connection with your audience
• Unless a company knows how to promote itself using mind-to-mind conversations, having great content that offers excellent value to its target audience will make a huge difference.
• Content marketing makes it easy for your prospects to find your business

Usually, every time a savvy buyer is confronted with a problem, he tries to find a solution on the internet, right? Therefore, for a business willing to make itself more visible on search engines, well-optimised and quality content is essential in reaching your audience.

The importance of content within customer buying cycles

As buyers go through several stages of the buying cycle, they need content at each stage to strengthen their willingness to buy your product or service.

For example, how would a prospect know whether your product is within his budget or what other customers are saying about your product?

Content plays a significant role at this stage in convincing prospects in favour of buying your product or service. Without relevant web content, prospects might choose your competitor over yours.

Key forms of content that may work well for your business

So, now you know what content marketing is and how it might benefit your business, here are some of the best actionable ways to start your content marketing strategy without any professional aid:

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