Content Marketing:-

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Instead of pitching products or services, a strategic content-driven approach provides relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve issues in their work (B2B content) or personal lives (B2C content).

Effective use of this approach requires a documented strategy. Building one doesn’t have to be complicated. Read How To Write a 1-Page Content Marketing Strategy: 6 Easy-to-Follow Steps to learn what questions to ask and how to develop your strategy.

Why use content marketing?

For one thing, marketing today is impossible without great content.

Content should be integrated into your marketing process, not treated as something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing, including:

Email marketing: Consistently great content trains your audience to anticipate, open and read emails from your brand.
Social media marketing: Content strategy comes before your social media strategy.
SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
PR: Successful PR strategies should address issues readers care about, not their business.
PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
Inbound marketing: Content is critical to driving inbound traffic and leads.
Digital marketing: Content forms the foundation for an improved or rebooted integrated digital marketing strategy.
Content strategy: Content strategy (which determines how content is created and managed throughout an organization) must be considered.

What are some examples of brands using content marketing?

CMI research shows the vast majority of marketers use content marketing. In fact, it is used by many prominent organizations in the world, including:

It’s also developed and executed by small and mid-sized businesses around the globe. Even government agencies are getting on board.

How does content marketing support the bottom line and customers’ needs?

Wouldn’t it be great if your customers looked forward to receiving your marketing? What if when they received it (whether through print, email, social channels, your blog, or website), they spent time engaging with it? What if they anticipated it and shared it with their peers?

Go back and read the definition one more time. Notice the phrase “relevant and valuable.” That’s the difference between strategic content and informational spam sent by companies trying to sell first rather than help first.

When businesses create excellent content, they can expect one or more of these four benefits:

Increased sales
Cost savings
Better customers who have more loyalty
Content-driven revenue (i.e., content as a profit center)

Content is the present – and future – of marketing

Ready to learn more? We can help. Here are a few popular ways to dig in:

Just getting started? Check out this guide, where you’ll learn the basic steps for putting a plan in place.
Are you in content or marketing leadership? Subscribe to Chief Content Officer to keep up with content and marketing trends.
Want to benchmark your career and salary against others? Download our latest research into the 2024 outlook for content salaries and careers (including AI’s impact on both).
Want to learn from your peers and industry experts? Attend a CMI event.
Need advice, coaching, or training specific to your organization? Contact our consulting group, led by strategist Robert Rose, to find out how they can help you meet your content challenges.

Why is content marketing important?

The world is transitioning to a point where customers are tired of being fed advertisements. Consumers are inundated with information to the point where it all becomes noise. Content marketing helps businesses overcome the noise by subtly promoting their offerings through helpful, high-quality content.

Content marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming customers with advertising-laden messaging, it provides them with valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey.

Content marketing is also beneficial because it can:

Educate leads and prospects about your product and services. Content marketing allows businesses to promote themselves while offering tangible value to an interested audience, which can increase brand awareness and engagement. At the same time, businesses can subtly promote their products and services, educating more people about their offerings.
Increase conversions. Content marketing works because it helps brands show that they care about and understand customer needs, which can translate into higher conversion rates.
Build relationships with customers. Few people are ready to buy something when they first learn about your business. Content marketing makes it possible to build relationships and deepen trust with your audience, which can encourage them to eventually convert.
Demonstrate how your product or service solves a pain point. With a solid content marketing plan, you can create content tailored to each customer’s pain points. Blog posts, demo videos, and customer testimonials make it easier for businesses to offer in-depth explanations of how their products or services help customers.
Increase visibility. Content marketing connects your business with more potential customers while making your business more renowned in your industry. Businesses can get the word out about their brand by creating consistent, high-quality content that generates more traffic from search engines.
Improve authority. Authority is the key to becoming an industry leader and increasing sales. Build trust by creating helpful, high-quality content that positions your business as a thought leader in your sector.
Foster loyalty. Regularly sharing high-quality, compelling content makes it possible for businesses like yours to deepen relationships with customers. Over time, this can ultimately boost the loyalty these customers feel toward your brand.

How content marketing works

Your business can use content marketing to attract leads, make a case for your product or service when someone is researching what to buy, and close sales.

To use it effectively, you’ll need to deliver the right content at each stage of the sales cycle—from awareness through consideration to purchase. If this sounds complicated, don’t worry: Approaching content this way actually simplifies the process.

Here’s how companies use content marketing in each stage of the sales cycle to engage and sell.

Awareness stage

At the first stage of the sales process, your content should focus on the top concerns of your audience. Writing about their pain points, challenges, and questions gives you the best chance of engaging with them. Content at the awareness stage should be educational, how-to advice. Save your selling for the consideration and closing phases.

The best content for this stage includes articles, blog posts, e-books, videos, and newsletters.

Examples:

A restaurant writes a blog post about how to plan a menu for a graduation party in the spring.
A bike touring company creates a short video on the topic “3 Ways to Choose the Right Bike Trip.”
An architecture firm creates an e-book called “Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Architect.”

Consideration stage

In the consideration stage, content should offer a hybrid of helpful information and marketing. It should educate the reader about what features or functions to look for and how various features address their needs. Of course, your content should lean toward what your business offers.

The best content for this stage includes case studies, how-to articles, how-to videos, and checklists or worksheets.

Examples:__

A cloud-based phone system company creates a checklist entitled “8 Ways to Improve Your Phone Customer Service” that details the features and functions that make great customer service possible.
A landscaping company creates case studies about “The Biggest Mistakes Most People Make When They Hire a Landscaper.”
A catering company features case studies of successful events with a focus on the benefits they offer, such as “How to Accommodate Food Allergies at Your Next Event,” or “How to Ensure Your Caterer Uses Sustainable Practices.”

Closing stage

Content marketing plays an important role when a prospect is close to buying. At this stage, you can focus on sales, as long as you continue to drive home why you’re the best choice rather than just how great your services or products are.

Your central message here should be your expertise, knowledge, and the differentiating benefits of what you sell.

Best content for this stage: case studies, user-generated content, buyer’s guide, product video, research report

Examples:

A consulting firm creates a research report proving that businesses that engage in strategic planning, assessments by outsiders, and other services—shaped by what services it offers—experience higher growth.
A design agency creates short videos showcasing the variety in its work across different industries to demonstrate its diverse expertise.
An orthodontist practice encourages patients to contribute testimonials about its state-of-the-art equipment and top-notch service.

How to get started with content marketing

Content marketing can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. A successful content marketing campaign should be manageable and sustainable. Take these steps to get started:

Identify your audience

To create content for a particular reader, you need to have a clear idea of their priorities, challenges, and preferences. If you have detailed descriptions of your various segments, choose 1 or 2 to write for. Otherwise, craft profiles of your audience members and prospects before starting.

Determine the right formats

The right format corresponds with what stage of the sales cycle you’re creating content for. Another important consideration includes what formats will best help you showcase value. For some, this will be a video; for others, a checklist.

An audience will judge your content on its quality, and they should. Identify the right resource, internal or external, to create this work. Regardless of who creates it, hire a professional proofreader to review anything before it goes out the door.

Determine how you’ll distribute

Will you post content on your site, email it to people, or print it for an event? Start with “where” you know your audience is likely to be, and choose formats that make sense. For example, an article makes sense to send via an email, a checklist or worksheet can be posted on social media, and a buyer’s guide is a good follow-up to a pitch.

Choose a sustainable schedule

Once you know who your target readers are and the best formats for every stage in the sales cycle, create a short-term (3-6 months) plan. It’s easy to develop a content marketing plan that’s overly ambitious. However, the plan you design should have content elements you can realistically make based on your budget and resources. Keep track of how long it takes you to create each piece of content so that you can build that time into your schedule.

Follow best practices

Compelling content is clearly written and doesn’t contain jargon that only you and your peers will know. It should also include detailed how-to advice. A short, relevant, actionable piece of content is best.

Content marketing and SEO

Content marketing makes it easy for good prospects to find your business. However, you can boost your efforts with search engine optimization (SEO).

Here are a few important best practices:

Keywords are the foundation of your SEO effort. These all-important words and phrases are the terms a prospect types into a search engine when they’re looking for a company, product, or service.

When you include the right keywords in your content, you’ll attract more traffic. The best keywords are:

Plain-language: language your audience uses to describe their pain points and needs
Relevant: keywords that match the expertise, products, and services you provide
Specific: a combination of your focus, industry expertise, prospect pain points, and other relevant details

SEO has evolved so that search success depends in part on how well your content does what it says it’ll do. Search engines review content copy, assess its relevance, and determine whether it delivers on what the headline promises.

Because of the importance search engines place on copy, using keywords throughout your content is important. Use the following guidelines:

Focus on 1 to 2 keywords. Avoid “keyword stuffing” by writing about what matters to your prospects with a focus on just a few keyword phrases.
Use keywords in the title. Make what the article is about clear and explicit.
Use keywords throughout. Find a way of naturally incorporating your keywords into your content.
Stay on topic. Good-quality content that provides advice related to a headline will perform best.

Social media and content marketing

Once you have content, it’s time to get the word out about it. Social media—Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Medium, Instagram and others—is a proven and easy way to promote your content. You write a post and link to your content, and then voila! People are engaged.

You can do this through 3 steps:

Focus on high-potential channels. The best social media outlets for you are the ones frequented by your audience. Consider the big, popular channels, as well as smaller, industry-focused ones that are likely to connect you with good prospects. Ask your audience what channels they favor and build a manageable list based on their preferences.
Craft your copy to fit the channel. Each social media channel has a level of professionalism versus fun, an accepted voice, and other details all its own. Before you write posts for a channel, spend some time reviewing posts to familiarize yourself with these details. Then, give your posts some of your own company spirit.
Test and modify your approach. A winning social media promotion effort involves trial and error. Track responses from the various channels for quantity and quality. Fewer high-potential engagements may mean a channel is a good fit, as opposed to a slew of clicks that never turn into an audience.

Put content to work for your business

Let your expertise and unique value shine through by creating content that attracts, engages, and sells. With some planning and systematic content marketing, you can reach the right people and drive brand loyalty.

Mailchimp can help you take your online content marketing strategy to the next level by allowing you to create optimized content for social media, your website, and your email marketing campaigns. Use our tools to make branded content, including landing pages and paid ads, that can inform your customers about your offerings and business. With your own brand style guide, you can begin to build a brand identity and let your business show customers its remarkable personality.

CONTENT MARKETING