What Is Content Marketing? A Beginner’s Guide To Content Marketing
Content Marketing is the effective use of content that is authentic, educates, entertains, and inspires customers to discover you, trust you, and buy from you. I will introduce Jeff Bullas’s article to share strategies for using Content for effective marketing to help develop a long-term business.
If you create engaging online content then you will attract leads and sales.
The term used to describe it is Inbound Marketing.
As a sales and marketing professional, it seems to make a lot of sense, the idea is to attract customers rather than pursue them.
The internet has arrived and websites, search engines, and online publishing are becoming mainstream, online stores have become more reliable and popular.
New tools and platforms have evolved.
But the real start to making it easy to publish and get attention went from fad to global trend.
It is the social media networks that are emerging rapidly.
Big questions
Passion project begins and Content creation begins.
But the big question is, will my amateur writing appeal to an audience?
Other questions?
[+] Can you increase revenue from content creation?
[+] Can you build a business around it?
[+] Is this a fad?
[+] When I started publishing, I also started sharing my creations with a few of my followers on And they responded.
The article will cover the basics of content marketing and the many ways it can help you grow your business. I will focus on a do-it-yourself approach to keep costs down and help you understand what keeps customers interested and engaged with your brand.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is focused on creating and distributing relevant and valuable content, with the aim of attracting a well-defined audience, building lasting relationships with them, and ultimately, turning them into loyal customers.
The keywords you need to remember are relationships of relationships, goals of relationships between relationships, and your relationships. If you generate unqualified traffic; very bad, you are wasting precious time and resources creating content for the wrong audience.
Done right, Content Marketing is the effective use of content that informs, educates (and sometimes entertains, and inspires) customers to discover you, trust you, and buy from you.
The great thing that often goes unappreciated is that if it’s done with perseverance and with the game in mind for the long term, the content becomes an asset that keeps on giving.
[+] People will find answers (as content) from your blog or website doing a Google search.
[+] They will discover your YouTube video in a tweet or on Facebook.
[+] They will sign up for a web discussion and buy your product or service.
But to succeed with content, you need a pull, not a push mindset.
A vision for next year, not next week.
An approach that revolves around building digital assets that accumulate value over time, rather than expiring digital assets that become obsolete and die when you turn off ads.
The Importance Of Content Marketing
One of the main reasons content marketing works is because it focuses on telling stories and building stories, rather than just bombarding with sales messages.
People are more likely to engage with a brand that offers quality educational content than just focusing on selling their product.
Buying decisions are not always rational. It is not true that prospects choose one brand over another.
The personal feelings and beliefs that accompany the story are the key factors that drive people to action. Consumers often choose brands whose narrative reflects their point of view and embodies their ideal life principles.
It’s not just a theory; There are numbers to prove it
[+] According to RequestMetric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising.
[+] It also generates three times more leads.
[+] Businesses that use content marketing have six times higher conversion rates than those that don’t, according to Aberdeen.
[+] A study by the Custom Content Council found that 72% of businesses think content marketing is more effective than magazine advertising.
[+] 62% say it produces better results than TV ads.
[+] 69% of marketers say branded content outperforms both direct mail and public relations (PR).
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to studies that prove the effectiveness of content marketing. Here you can find many statistics that support its value.
Benefits Of Content Marketing
Here are some of the personal benefits I have gained on this journey:
[+] Build a content hub (Hub Content) of digital assets that attract leads and sales.
[+] It develops credibility and trust when you publish content that answers customer questions.
[+] Quality content can establish you and your brand as a thought leader in your industry spreading influence and authority.
[+] It educates your customers and potential customers, builds loyalty, turns them into fans and advocates.
The core of content marketing really comes down to one simple idea: leadership vs selling.
Selling is an immediate call to action, a proposal that should end with a clear decision. The customer will or will not buy the product or service.
What’s more?
The effectiveness of a sales-focused strategy ends as soon as you stop pouring money into it, your pay-per-click or Facebook ads will stop generating leads as soon as your campaign ends.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is a gift that keeps on giving, a high-quality article can make a profit a week, a month, or even a year after you create it.
Hopefully, now that you’re on the content marketing team with me, If so, how do you build a content strategy and make the most of this approach to grow your business?
Build Your Content Marketing Platform
A common content marketing mistake people make is that they jump right in without building a foundation first. Here’s what you need to do to make sure your strategy will work.
Hire The Right Team
Content marketing can feel a bit overwhelming, especially if it’s a new concept and you don’t know where to start. Getting help from others to craft and execute your plan is not only smart but encouraging.
But, be sure to choose your team carefully, talk about your brand identity, your value set, your ideal customer profile, and what you’re looking to achieve as a business. Help them relate to your brand vision inspires them to want to work with you.
Your team doesn’t necessarily need to hire 10 full-time employees. If you’re a small business or entrepreneur, consider the other options you have available to you to build the skill set you’ll need to succeed – outsourcing to freelancers and contractors, for example.
Here are some of the digital marketing roles you, your team, or your outsourced partner will need to execute your content marketing strategy:
[+] Content marketing manager or project coordinator
[+] Content creator or copywriter
[+] Graphic designer (Designer)
[+] Content Curator
[+] Researcher (Researcher)
[+] Community manager
[+] Brand monitor
[+] Influencer and partnership management
Think About Your Brand Voice
How do you want potential customers to perceive your brand? Do you want to be seen as a friendly brand or a professional business?
Develop your brand voice and stick with it across all channels, create guidelines for you and your team to follow about your brand colors, font use, language, and other things that shouldn’t affect your perception of the market.
Content Marketing Goals
Look at your content marketing objective documents and tie them back to your main business goal. Here are some common examples of areas where you might want to make your content marketing goals a starting point:
[+] Brand Awareness
[+] Authority & Influence
[+] Social proof and case studies
[+] Market research and product ideas
[+] Target customer research
[+] Website traffic
[+] Lead Generation
[+] Customer Acquisition
[+] Brand loyalty and customer retention
[+] Customer referral
[+] Customer service
[+] Customers available (onboarding)
Create A Customer Profile
A customer profile, or buyer persona, is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
An effective customer profile goes beyond demographic information and captures things like interests, preferences, fears, hopes, and dreams – helping you to truly understand your customers.
A well-built customer profile will help you make things a little better. Your content will resonate more with your audience, which will lead to more engagement, more traffic, and inevitably more purchases; without a good understanding of your ideal customer, your content marketing strategy is likely to fail.
To create a buyer persona, here’s a brief process to follow:
[+] Find a buyer persona template that’s right for your business and industry.
[+] Start researching your customers to fill out this form, on social media, search engines, and through customer surveys.
[+] Consolidate your research into at least one simple buyer persona, or several if you need to.
[+] Use a buyer persona to guide your content marketing.
Read more related articles:
What Is Content Marketing? A Beginner’s Guide To Content Marketing
