What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on delivering unique, useful and shareable content to a particular target audience. The goal is to generate leads, establish your branding and provide value to your customers.
Why care about Content Marketing?
There are many types of inbound marketing available to you as a business owner, here’s the reasons why Content Marketing is arguably the best way to market your business:
- Raise Brand Awareness - Sharing content gets you out in the world interacting with people, new people will learn about you and what you offer.
- SEO - More content seen by more people will improve your SEO rankings
- Audience Building - If you’re creating great content, people will begin to know, like and trust you. This builds consumer confidence in your products and keeps them following you.
- Help & Support - Content such as how-to guides or product reviews help keep your customers happy by answering important questions, teaching them or guiding them to the right product.
- Social Media Reach - Instead of posting sales and products, content marketing provides you with alternate media to share in order to better engage with customers and build trust.
- Selling - Content marketing can help feature and raise awareness of products. It does not need to be a hard sell, but creating content to announce a new product can make a huge difference.
What “content’ do I share? How does it work?
The content that will work best for you depends heavily on your particular industry and company. Here’s some examples of content marketing and who might use them:
BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHY
Quality photography can make the difference between a sale and an empty cart. Don’t limit your photography to just product photos, create exciting lifestyle photos showing your product “out in the wild” to connect with your customers emotions. If you have a huge state of the art facility, take photos of the building to show off or if you sell camping equipment, take photos of the equipment out at a campsite.
PRODUCT VIDEOS
Product videos have been around for decades in the form of “commercials”, and they still work as well as they always have. With YouTube gaining massive popularity, content creators are building huge audiences around things like unboxing videos and product reviews. Create your own content or work with content creators to produce videos that bring your products to life.
HOW-TO GUIDES
Is your product simple or complex? Do you get customers calling daily asking “simple” questions? Be proactive and create content answering the questions you get. This could be as simple as a Frequently Asked Questions section, or as complex as a full-on product manual. Post helpful advice, tricks or guides to help out your customers. This is a great way to handle customer service and build trust in your brand.
QUIZZES and CONTESTS
You can utilize quizzes and contents to learn a lot about your customers and drive engagement. Obtain feedback by creating and sharing quizzes! This will do two things: first, it will give you a valuable glimpse into the mind of your customers and second, it will allow you to engage with your audience directly and get immediate feedback. You can even offer incentive to complete the quiz via coupons, perks or store credit.
Here’s some other examples of content you could share:
- Blogs
- Newsletters
- Magazines
- E-Books
- Book Reviews
- Lists
- Interviews
- Research Reports / Studies
- White Papers
- Press Releases
- Opinion Articles
- Podcasts
- Graphs or Infographics
- Image Galleries
- Memes
- Webinars
- Demos
What makes a piece of content worth sharing?
First off, content marketing shouldn’t go straight for the hard sell. Provide information, inspire, educate or entertain while staying true to your audience’s interests and motivations. Attract attention by creating enjoyable content even if it’s not obviously branded.
Imagine you were your own customer, what content would you be interested in? What would be most useful to you?
With these things in mind, you can now build your content marketing strategy, and with it your brand, your audience, and naturally, your revenue!