Content marketing is a form of marketing brands implement to provide value to their target market. Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable online material like videos and blog posts to stimulate interest in a brand’s products or services. This kind of marketing does not outwardly promote a brand but attracts, engages, and interests users through different forms of content.
In order to meet strategic goals through content marketing, brands plan, create, promote, and analyze content their target audience can benefit from.
When a brand creates an effective content marketing strategy, this allows them to track offers and generate leads, measure engagement, and more.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing has one of the most significant benefits in digital marketing. It establishes the foundation for a successful, well-performing inbound strategy. If you do not have content, you do not have anything to optimize and share on your social media sites.
Content marketing helps brands:
- Increases visibility of your brand
- Develops lasting relationships with your audience
- Improves brand awareness and recognition
- Creates loyalty and trust, with both your current customers and prospects
- Helps you to build authority and credibility
- Positions your business as an expert in your industry
- Generates traffic to your site to improve lead generation
- Opens a channel of communication through social shares and comments
- Helps your customer move through the purchase decision more quickly
- Provides value with no strings attached
Types of Content Marketing Material
The best types of content marketing material to help your business grow include:
- Blog posts and articles
- Press releases
- Social media updates
- Infographics
- GIFs
- Photos
- E-books
- Web pages
- Audio podcasts
- Video podcasts
- Live streams
- Social media stories
- Short films and documentaries
- Newsletters
- Quizzes
- Discount offers
- Emails
- Guides
- Slide decks
- Whitepapers
- Reports
- Webinars
- Case studies and testimonials
- Comparison/spec sheets
- And many more!
How to Effectively Optimize Content Marketing
Knowing what the best content marketing tools and platforms to use are always important. But it would be better to know how to create and implement an effective strategy that benefits your brand.
Here’s how to do that:
- Define your business path and goals. Do you want to boost your website traffic? What about increasing your lead generation efforts? You can’t successfully lay a content marketing strategy foundation unless you know why you’re doing it.
- Identify your target audience. Create buyer personas to define the specific characteristics of who you are trying to target. Include nuisances like demographics, behaviors, personal interests, and online content preferences.
- Craft and hone your voice and tone. Your brand voice needs to be consistent throughout your content marketing strategy, because your audience will notice any sudden sway in tone, positioning, or stance in your content.
- Determine your content channels. Figure out how and where you want to distribute your content. Do you want to write blog posts? Make the most out of your email marketing efforts? There are no limits to what you can do when you promote your content. Just make sure it aligns with your SMART business goals.
- Map out your strategy. Pick a topic. Your topic must resonate with your audience but also have a clear call to action, such as contacting your company. Create editorial content calendars to schedule your content topics and types and where you will be distributing them. If you decide on social media as your main outlet for content promote, creating a social media content calendar will keep your work organized in one spot.
- Implement your strategy. Here is where you schedule time to do some work. You’re actively promoting your content efforts according to the strategy you created.
- Evaluate your progress. See if your content marketing efforts are working or not. Remember that a content marketing strategy is never perfect. It will always need work. If your content is benefitting your consumer and your business, that’s a sign that it’s working. If not, this is where you will need to make those necessary changes. Maybe you might invest in a content marketing platform to make the job easier for you.
- Adapt to your results. Content marketing thrives on adaptation based on previous results. Don’t be afraid to try new types of content, different approaches to distribution, or any other tactics you find; you never know the outcome until you try.
