You may have heard the term content marketing, but what exactly is it? The Content Marketing Institute defines it as “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.”
With traditional marketing becoming less effective, valuable and relevant content is exactly what your audience wants from your company. And it needs to reach them in a way that feels natural rather than disruptive. A great way to do this is by creating a narrative with your content, better known as storytelling. This makes your content feel more authentic and engaging, and your customers will be more likely to seek it out and engage with it.
Important to Your Customers and Bottom Line
Effective content marketing is important because it can help attract, engage, and delight your audience and target markets. As a result, this can increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, establish your company as an industry leader, and more. Content marketing also supports other digital marketing channels, providing additional content for social media and contributing to SEO by, among other things, building up searchable content on your website.
According to the Content Institute’s research, many marketers are using content marketing, including some of the world’s biggest brands. Here are a few benefits of great content marketing:
- It educates your customers about the products or services you offer.
- It can help boost conversions.
- It helps build customer loyalty.
- It can create a community around your brand.
6 Types of Content Marketing:
- Social media: You can work with a number of different platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn, among others) to create and share content such as photos, live or pre-recorded videos, stories, and written posts.
- Infographics: With a mix of short statements and clear images, infographics are a great way to display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand graphic format. They work well if you’re looking to convey a complex topic or educational content in a way that makes it easy for your audience to digest.
- Blogs: Blogs are a powerful type of content that lend themselves well to storytelling. They allow for a lot of creativity in purpose and topics covered. A blog allows you to promote other content and articles via links and social share buttons, and is a perfect venue for incorporating product information.
- Podcasts: A recent survey found that 49% of 12-32-year-olds listened to podcasts for an average of six listening hours per week. Is it any wonder why so many media outlets and brands have started podcasts? They allow you to get creative with topics, guests, and episode length — plus, they have the added bonus of giving you visibility in iTunes.
- Videos: 69% of consumers say they prefer to learn about products and services through video. Video marketing can help boost conversions, improve ROI, and build relationships with your audience. You can also share video content on social media, your blog, or your website.
- Paid advertising: Paid ads help you reach a broad audience and allow you to position yourself in the places you want to be seen. They’re especially effective if they feature content that tells your brand’s story. Paid ads can be shared on social media, landing pages, and banners, as well as in sponsored content.
The secret sauce of content marketing? Add value. Your audience will seek out and engage with content that is interesting and that resonates with them. They might spend more time with it and even share it with friends and colleagues. Look beyond focusing only on a pitch for your products and services and instead use content to help your audience solve their issues, engage with your brand, and hopefully find some delight, too.
If you’d like to learn more about content marketing or need help creating your own content marketing strategy, get in touch with our team today.
