What is Content Marketing?
It is a marketing technique for creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.It is the practice of sharing information with and educating consumers instead of selling to them. It’s the practice of teaching your customers/members something or helping them solve a problem in their lives.
Why Content Marketing?
- Content Marketing creates awareness and once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. In brief, Content Marketing increases product visibility and initiate purchase process.
- It can improve your brand’s relationships with consumers, can be used to attract new traffic to your site, or you could use it as a conduit to earn more conversions from your existing site visitors.
- It provides additional content for social media marketing and contributes to SEO efforts by generating natural inbound links and building up good content on your website that gets found in search engines.
- The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal if executed correctly.
4 Most popular examples of content marketing
Infographics
- It is a neat way to bundle up valuable information, summarize it and present it in a clear way.
- It’s all about taking a subject that might be hard to explain in words and explaining it with images.
Podcasts
- These are the radio of the 21st century and a very powerful content marketing tool.
- There are just less advertising and more value.
- Most podcasts usually have a sponsor or advertise a product at the beginning and at the end of the show.
- People love them because they can listen to their idols and hero’s spill their guts about whatever topic they’re interested in.
Videos
- People spend more time watching YouTube than any television network, especially younger ones.
- They watch videos. They make videos. They share videos, and it’s not just for entertainment. YouTube is their go-to place for information and advice.
Blogs
- It is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (“posts”).
- Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.
- A typical blog combines text, digital images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic.
- The ability of readers to leave publicly viewable comments, and interact with other commenters, is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs.
5 Ways To Increase ROI on Content Marketing
- Make your content serve multiple goals
Content marketing can be used for a variety of purposes. The best strategies use content for a bit of everything, which maximizes the value of every piece. Optimize it for search engines, for readers, and for conversions—all at once.
- Make content production leaner
Reduce what you’re paying for your content marketing campaign by making your production process leaner. You can do this by working with specialists capable of producing the best content for the lowest possible expenditure, by cleaning up the collaborative processes you have in place throughout your organization, or by implementing more content marketing automation tools that spare you manual efforts.
- Focus on evergreen content
“Evergreen” content refers to any piece of content that has the potential to remain relevant indefinitely (as opposed to news-based content, or content that’s only relevant for a brief amount of time). Evergreen content will pay off consistently for a longer period of time, ultimately returning a higher profit on your investment.
- Revisit, reinvent, and reuse your content
Once created, your content isn’t doomed to a life of stagnation. Try to revisit, reinvent, or reuse some of the pieces you’ve done in the past. For example, you could write a follow-up piece to a popular post you wrote last year, predicting what might happen this year. Or you could transform a currently popular post into a different medium, to capitalize on a different audience.
- Let your users create content for you
If you can, get your users to create content for you. You could create a user-driven forum that allows your customers to create, submit, and answer each other’s questions, or sponsor a content on social media that encourages users to take their own photos. Either way, you’ll engage your user base and get new content at the same time, significantly lowering your costs.
Digital Marketing Unravelled 