COntent Marketing

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, and publishing content online that centers around your core topics and keywords. The goal is to attract and connect with your target audience and convert them into leads by solving their problems with valuable, useful content.

Types of Content

Here are some types of content that are typically included in a digital marketing strategy.

Blog posts

Blog posts are a great way to attract potential customers with highly targeted content. You can also use blog posts as a jumping off point to other digital marketing tactics like email marketing.

Webpages

Optimized content (including images) on your website pages increases your search engine rank and connects you with people who are looking for your content.  

Videos

Consumers are demonstrating a strong preference for video content when they want to learn about a new product or service. Videos also help boost conversations and establish a relationship with your audience.

Infographics

Infographics deliver information and content with a combination of graphics and concise written descriptions. Ideal for breaking down a complex topic or concept.

Podcasts

These prerecorded audio programs allow brands to deliver on-demand content to a captive audience and create a list of subscribers.

The Role of Content in Digital Marketing

The primary role of content marketing in your digital marketing strategy is to attract and connect with your audience, leads, and customers to increase brand awareness, conversions, and engagement. Valuable, optimized content will do this in a natural, unforced way.

An essential part of a digital marketing strategy, content marketing:

• Boosts conversions
• Educates your audience, leads, prospects, and customers about your products/services and how to use them
• Improves brand awareness
• Boosts SEO rank
• Establishes a connection with your customers and a community around your brand
• Increases revenue
• Establishes you as an expert/industry leader

The Cons of Content Marketing

Content marketing is an integral part of a digital marketing strategy, but it does come with its own set of challenges. The negatives primarily come from the demands of consistently creating novel, helpful content at all stages of the buyer’s journey.

Time-consuming

Content marketing requires regular content, ideally across various mediums. This can be very time-consuming. Even if you have the talent in-house, it can be difficult to generate a new spin on an ‘old’ topic, over and over. For example, if your niche is organization and time-management, it can be challenging to spin it in different ways that will keep your regular readers, viewers, and listeners coming back. When you need an infusion of inspiration, look to guests, success stories, new trends and tech, holiday themes, or audience questions.

Benefits aren’t immediate

Content marketing is a long-term project. It will take time to reap its benefits. For example, to secure loyalty and gain subject matter authority, you need to compile a significant library of content. You also must engage in some trial and error – determining what type of content resonates with your audience, and what falls flat. You will need to test out not only the subject matter, but the way in which it is delivered. For example, does your audience predominantly prefer unscripted video content, infographics, or blog posts?

Requires content for all stages of the buyer’s journey

Content marketing isn’t just about getting people to subscribe. You need to create content for all stages of the customer journey. So, you need to raise awareness to attract people; create educational content for the newcomers at the consideration stage; develop compelling and convincing content for those at the decision stage; and finally, continue to provide valuable content to customers, post-purchase. That can add up to a lot of content to create!