What is Content Marketing?
What is Content?
Content can be defined as any meaningful material, idea, information, or message that is presented to an audience through a medium. Content comes in many forms like written, audio, visual, audio-visual, etc.
They are many types of content, some of them include; blog post, e-mails, eBooks, video content, infographics, podcasts, etc.
Why Quality Content Matters
- Helps SEO Strategy: One of the ranking factors that determines your site’s rank is the quality,uniqueness, and relevance of your content. So by creating good content, you are also helping your company’s SEO.
- Builds Trust: When you consistently create meaningful content that is relevant to your niche, you are showing your audience that you know what you are doing and you are competent in what you do. Thus, they start to trust you more.
- Lead Generation: Your unique and quality content if helpful to people will help you in drawing more leads to your company.
- Attracts Traffic: If your content interests, helps, and educate people, they will like to know about who created such quality content. Which means they will have to access your site to find out more about you.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing can be defined as the process of planning and creating relevant and meaningful content which is published and delivered to an audience so as to create awareness for your brand and to convince them to buy your products or services.
The core of content marketing has always been storytelling. To create an amazing story to tell to your audience to convince them to buy your product or service. Even though the term “Content Marketing” itself was invented and implemented by John F. Oppedahl, the practice itself has been taking place for hundreds of years.
Why Do We Use Content Marketing?
Did you know that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times the amount of leads.
How Content Marketing Works
Content marketing is all about the content, the story that you tell.
You have to create your own unique, relevant, and engaging content. You can’t just use anything, it has to speak to your audience like you are having a one-on-one conversation with them. the content has to answer their questions, or they won’t like it.
Then you have to find the right medium to use when posting your content. The medium has to be able to reach your target audience but it also has to be suitable for your content. For example, when your content usually comprises of “How To” videos, the best medium for you to display the content is Youtube. Or you can reach out to influencers or affiliate marketers to get them to post your content.
What happens next is out of your hands, as you have to wait for people to search for topics relevant to your content, find the content and read or listen to it. If they enjoyed the content and found it helpful, they might recommend it to other interested people, which will help your SEO rank and also help you in increasing brand awareness.
If more and more people find your content helpful and enjoyable, it can help you generate more leads and also help in building trust.
Types of Content Marketing
- Blog Posts Content Marketing: A blog is a webpage or a website that is regularly updated by an individual or an organization with stories, articles, or thoughts about different topics, mostly topics that are relevant to their niche. A blog is usually used to talk about the writers interest, for example a travel blogger who writes about all the interesting things he sees or have happened on his travels, or an educative health blog written by a doctor talking about the best ways to cure a fever or a cold at home.
Your company can use a blog to post about thing that are related to your products or services. You shouldn’t post things that tell your reader to buy your products but things that inform them about the benefits of using your product or is using them important.
2. Video Content Marketing: Video content marketing involves the creation and recording of video content that is meant to inform, educate, or help the viewers. This can help you build relationships with your audience and videos engage quickly with an audience.
Research shows that online videos have a 92% audience reach worldwide. Which means that the chance of people viewing your video content is vary high. And by reaching such a large audience, lead generation and brand awareness becomes easier.
3. Infographics Content Marketing: Infographics display information in a very easy to understand graphic format, using short sentences, simple wordings and pictures or diagrams. They easily grab attention because they look interesting.
4. E-books: These are short books usually longer than blog posts. E-books are used to educate the audience about something or to teach them how to do something. Usually these e-books are provided on landing pages and the visitor has to subscribe to a newsletter or sign up to download them for free. E-books are a great way to generate leads and increase brand awareness.
4. Podcasts: Podcasts are very easy to produce as they are just audio files recorded and uploaded in snippets called episodes. The topic of these episodes can be decided by you and also the length of the episodes. You can also invite guests to come and speak during one of your episodes. You are able to build better relationships with your audience because the stories you share may be personal and resonate with the audience.
Advantages of Content Marketing
- Builds Awareness: The more people read, view, or interact with your content and find it helpful, the more they are going to rely on your content, and also take notice of your brand. If the content quality is enough they might even help you by referring people to view you content.
- Cost-Effective: Content marketing costs less that traditional marketing but still generates more ROI. And also it is inexpensive, costing almost nothing and it is for anyone and everyone.
- Builds Credibility: By creating and posting contents like case studies, “How to” blog posts, and other problem solving content, you will build a reputation and a credibility.
- Reach Target Audience: Using content marketing you will be able to reach your target audience some of whom you couldn’t reach using traditional marketing.
Disadvantages of Content Marketing
- Results take Time: The results of content marketing like SEO take time as they are long term strategies not for getting quick fixes or getting traffic immediately.
- Finding Ideas Can Get Difficult: As a beginner in content marketing, finding ideas on what type of content to post can get very challenging
- Requires Skill: Chances are you won’t be able to do it alone as they are a lot of factors top consider and also coming up with content ideas daily.
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