Content marketing has been all the rage for the last few years, and with good reason. It's relatively easy to create content in-house thanks to the widespread availability of marketing tools that make content creation more accessible to people who aren't trained designers.
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. Using content to market your business demonstrates your genuine commitment to solving your customer's pain points. Ultimately, this amplifies profitable customer action.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an approach that relies heavily on various forms of content. This can be anything from blog posts and articles and infographics to social media content and podcasts.
Its popularity is thanks to an ongoing culture shift in marketing and advertising. Simply pitching products and what they do is becoming less effective; people want to be able to relate to the experience the product provides. Content is the way to do that.
It's the ideal way to be approachable and conversational with your target audience. That's because content is relatable and valuable, unlike the cold product pitches of traditional advertising. As a result, you'll actually be able to sell more because you've cultivated a loyal customer base.
Regardless of what type of marketing approach you use, content should play a role in it as it's fairly easy to produce and can be relatively low-cost because of the number of free tools out there that make it easy to produce graphics that pop.
Your overarching marketing strategy should include how you'll use content to complement your other marketing efforts. In your social media strategy, this means outlining how often you'll post and what types of content you'll use. In your email strategy, you'll need to outline how often you'll send newsletters, what you'll include, and how you'll segment your email list to send personalized offers.
Remember: search engine algorithms reward the consistent publishing of quality content, so you'll need to create a realistic schedule and stick to it in order to improve your SEO.
Conclusion
Sharing quality content can be extremely beneficial even if you don't dive right into full-fledged content marketing. When done right, it helps foster brand loyalty which in turn boosts your sales. Customers crave connection to the brands they support, and publishing great content is an excellent way to accomplish that.
That said, it's important that you put together a content marketing strategy, whether that's a stand-alone document or included in your marketing strategy, to guide your efforts and ensure you're showing up regularly for your customers.
By consistently providing helpful and informative content, businesses can establish their brand as a thought leader in their industry and establish a relationship with their target audience that will lead to increased sales.
