What is Content Marketing?
Wikipedia (at the time of writing) defines Content marketing as:
“… a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online – [Joe Pulizzi, Wikipedia].
It is often used by businesses in order to achieve the following goals: attract attention and generate lead, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users.”
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Inbound Marketing
An important tactic as part of any Digital Marketing Strategy, and a simple tactic to understand, content marketing is an inbound approach to creating and distributing valuable stories, in fact consistently distributing valuable relevant stories, highly relevant and consistent content and entertaining content to initially attract, engage and entertain your specific targeted audience, namely your ideal clients to your landing pages. The ultimate aim being to encourage this audience, or community to help achieve our goals.
While it is simple, it is key to building your communities, and as such is a long term tactic. Over time you serve your growing communities with high-quality content, your ROI when your followers make purchases and become customers they already have some brand loyalty and will choose your products or services over your competitors.
The work you do on your value proposition, brand development and the marketing strategy produced, helps us understand what your customers needs are, and what pains we can resolve and gains we can provide with your products and services. We also know more about who your customers are, their persona, what they like, what they do, where they hangout…
We use this understanding when producing an optimised piece of content designed to reach out to your prospective customers, get them to find you and learn about your highly suitable products and services.
Some example so of the types of Content Marketing we could deploy:
- Social Media Posts
- Blog Post
- Case Studies
- eBooks
- White papers
- Infographics
- User generated content
- Testimonials
- Videos
- Audio
- Tutorials
- Presentations
Content Marketing Services
Social Media Posts
Content shared on social media, via a users profile or a company page. These can range from simple short updates (up to 500/600 words) to longer articles (1500+words). They can be content rich by including images, videos and links to other content.
Blog Post
Blog Posts are like Social Media articles, but these tend to be longer (1200+ words) and are hosted either in dedicated blogs or pages on your website. Whereas Social Media articles are usually hosted within the Social Media platform, like LinkedIn. Since a well written, optimised, content rich blog can generate high quality, relevant traffic, ideally you want this traffic going to your website.
Case Studies
eBooks
Whitepapers
Infographics
User Generated Content
Any content, social media posts (TikTok, YouTube, Tweets, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc,) text, video, product or service reviews created and published by your customers and brand advocates – and not by you, or you marketing people. This is great content, because it is created by your customers its authenticity, and your credibility, is taken to another level. People trust other people, User generated content is today’s “Word of Mouth”.
Testimonials
Videos
Audio
Tutorials
Presentations
Sales and Marketing presentations can be valuable content for your digital marketing and website. You probably have presentations designed for the various stages of your sales funnel, why not publish them (or versions of them) in the tactics, media and activities throughout the sales funnel.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing helps you answer your prospects questions. Your research and value proposition work informs you about your ideal customers. Further research, around search terms, search intent and keywords will inform you how these customers do their own research and due diligence when looking to purchase products and services like ours.
In short – great content and content marketing strategies drive profitable customer actions.
Now you know, not just who your deal customers are, but where they hang out, how to reach them and how to best present our messages. Now …
- You can create targeted content to answer very specific questions.
- You can optimise this content so the search engines can do their work and present our content to relevant, interested, prospects.
- And you can manage the distribution of this content, via digital marketing and other media, so your ideal prospects are increasingly likely to find it.
Now your content is being found by high quality prospects, who are likely to engage positively with this content.
Content Marketing as a Tactic
Remember, content marketing is one tactic we use as part of an holistic approach to our Marketing Strategies within our Marketing Campaigns. Keep in mind, we are targeting ideal clients. So, our top of funnel content is designed to attract and excite ideal clients and detract and deter prospects that we can’t serve well.
The reality is some prospects we don’t want, if we are not a good fit, they will take up our time, distract us and most likely not convert. Worse they WILL convert and take up way more of our time, valuable resources, and we will bend and twist to try to serve them well. It is a mess, is not likely to go well, and no one will be happy – you lose and your client loses. Detracting poor prospects is not leaving money on the table!
So, have confidence, stay with the marketing strategy, and be consistent across the tactics deployed – then where your products and services are a good fit, your ideal prospects will move through your funnel, quickly. Resulting in a client we can serve, profitably, confidently very well, and for the long term.
How Quickly Will I See the Results From My Content Marketing Efforts?
This is a difficult question to answer as results vary, wildly. Certainly, we know getting the marketing basics right, matters. The better your research to support your Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning, the better your results. Providing you allow this research to inform you when developing the value proposition and defining the ideal client persona. Then letting this work inform your marketing strategy, flowing through the tactical implementations, the quicker you get results.
That said, content marketing is a long-term tactic and as such your content marketing goals should also be long term. With successful content marketing, i.e. done right, you will see ‘signals’ that things are working in the first few months, encouraging signals like social media engagement growing, google analytics improving – bounce rate declining, time on site growing, the right pages being visited and pages visited growing as visitors follow the flow / story you have laid out for them. These inform us that leads are coming, soon.
If you insist on a numeric answer to ‘How quickly will I see the results from my content marketing efforts?’ googling this question and the consensus answer is 6-9 months. Our experience as a content marketing agency is, everything done well we would say more 6 than 9 months.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is content marketing?
How does content marketing help my business?
What type of content should I create?
What is shortform content?
What is Longform content?
How quickly will I see the results from my content marketing?
Googling this question and the consensus answer is 6-9 months. Our experience is, everything done well we would say more 4-6 than.