Content marketing
Introduction
Content marketing involves creating relevant, useful, engaging content to draw your audience in. Unlike traditional advertising, the content you create wont be directly persuading your audience to buy your products or services. Its about building a relationship with your potential customers.
Effective content marketing can help you build your marketing lists and increase brand awareness. It can help you develop your online audience and learn more about your customers needs. It supports your other marketing tactics. Ultimately it should lead to sales.
This guide outlines how content marketing can benefit your business. It suggests types of content and outlines how to plan, create, publish and evaluate content.
Benefits of content marketing
Content marketing is a technique being used increasingly by businesses to build relationships with potential customers. It works particularly well online. Relevant and high quality content gives your audience a reason to visit your website. You can then aim to convert your website visitors into customers.
Content marketing can boost your brand awareness among your target market. It can be a cost effective way to reach your audience and build loyalty. Ultimately, it should lead to increased sales.
Content marketing is a long term strategy. As time goes on and you publish more content, you will be able to build up knowledge about what works best. This helps you to plan future content. It also provides insight into your customers interests and needs.
Content and your marketing tactics
Quality content underpins all forms of marketing. Having valuable content can be the key to success for a number of marketing tactics:
Social media: Good content is key to building your online audience on social media, building relationship and driving engagement. See social media best practice for business.
Search engine optimisation (SEO): Search engines give higher rankings to websites that regularly publish quality content. To build your inbound links you will need to have useful content that other websites want to link to.
Public Relations (PR): Successful PR campaigns depend on content that the audience is interested in.
Pay-per-click and paid search advertising: Search engine advertising works best when the content is relevant to the user. This leads to lower costs-per-click and ultimately higher conversions.
Types of content for marketing
There are many formats and types of content you can use for marketing purposes. Consider what will work best for your business. Use a combination of different formats and try new things for comparison and evaluation.
Blog posts
Blog posts should provide valuable content to your audience. This could take the form of lists, reviews, how-to guides, opinion pieces and much more. Experiment with different post lengths, topics and formats to find out what works best. Publish blog posts regularly so your visitors will keep returning for more.
Infographics
Infographics present concepts and information visually. This can be a good way to make a topic more interesting and engaging. It can help you share data in way clear and easy-to-understand way.
Videos
While creating videos can cost you more time and resources, it can be a highly effective format. Videos can be shared across social media. They can draw your audience in with engaging visuals and sound.
Videos dont have to be slick corporate productions. You can try live-streaming from a smartphone and other inexpensive options.
Podcasts
Podcasts are an increasingly popular content format. A podcast could take the form of an interview or a conversation between subject matter experts.
Ebooks
Ebooks are usually presented as PDF downloads. Users will normally need to provide some personal details, such as their name and email address, through a lead generation form before they can download the ebook. They are longer and more in-depth than blog posts. They should contain valuable and comprehensive information about the topic.
Ebooks are a good incentive to offer customers something in exchange for their contact details. This can be a key way to build your marketing lists.
Templates
Templates can be extremely valuable to your audience, offering an easy, time-saving solution. This can help build brand loyalty. Like ebooks, they can be used to generate leads.
Other types of content
There are many other content formats you can try, including:
case studies
photo/image galleries
FAQs
quizzes
polls
research findings
company news
competitions
user generated content
online tools
white papers