WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?

Content marketing is one of those words you’ve probably heard thrown about a lot lately, and like just about any other hot buzzword of the day, you’ll be forgiven if you’re not totally sure what it is. It’s actually a fair broad term requiring a broad definition. We rather like the version from the Content Marketing Institute: “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 — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Maybe a better way to understand what content marketing is would be to look at the trend that has created it. Much of traditional advertising is about finding ways to get a brand’s message in front of the consumer’s eyes and into their ears. This encompasses billboards, tv and radio spots, newspaper and magazine ads, web banner and video ads etc. The problem is that consumers are more tuned out than ever. DVRs let them skip commercials – if they even watch traditional TV anymore at all. Ad blockers have put a big hit on web-based ads. Even billboards suffer as people are ever-more engaged with the phone in their hands than the giant writing on the wall.

Content marketing is a way around this. The idea is that by creating good content, you can bring the consumer to your messaging. We recently wrote about event marketing which is a similar strategy of bringing people to your brand, though obviously engaging them in an event rather than feeding them content. Good content marketing gives consumers something interesting, entertaining, or useful as a way to introduce them to your brand, and from there, hopefully turn them into a customer.

Why content marketing works

Content marketing is the ultimate soft sell, treating the consumer as an intelligent person. Believe it or not, people actually like this. The best content marketing educates consumers and provides them with something of value. Some lean startups can do amazing things on a shoestring, but most companies still need a dedicated marketing budget to create good enough content to make this work. Still, the return on investment from great content marketing can be amazing.

In addition to direct customer acquisition, great content is shared, and the best goes viral. Even if most people never make a purchase, if a great video really travels, even a small percentage of the millions of views it gets can still translate to an enormous jump in sales. For written content, the number of links to a great blog post can do wonders for SEO (search engine optimization – basically, getting your site higher in Google search results). Blogs, by the way are one of the best known content marketing mediums. There’s a reason they’re the only SEO technique specifically endorsed by Google.

A brief history

We’re advertising people and we’re kinda geeky about the history of our craft, so we couldn’t resist passing along this video timeline of the history of content marketing. It’s all the rage today, but it’s been around for a pretty long time.

Getting started with your own content marketing

The very first step to content marketing is something you should already be doing. It’s also fairly easy. Managing your social media accounts is crucial, and that means posting consistently on any and all channels you choose to have a presence on. Step two is a bit harder, and you’ve probably already guessed that it’s creating good content. This may be somewhat difficult as it takes immense creativity to create a great content marketing campaign. The exception to this is a blog, which anyone should be able to do. You know who your customers are, and you know what interests them. Anything that will help them, entertain them, or answer any questions you think they might have will make a great post. It couldn’t matter less that it’s not directly related to your core business. That’s pretty much the point. In the long term, a good blogging strategy will pay dividends to nearly any business.

Always provide value

Traditional marketing means bringing a message to the consumer. Content marketing flips this on its head and seeks to draw the consumer to the content, but the only way to do this is by creating a great message. If it provides no value, it will not be seen and it certainly will not be shared. It takes a sea change in your thinking to implement this marketing strategy, but done right it can have a huge return on investment. Consumers are increasingly jaded and turned off by a hard sell. Respecting their intelligence by giving them something of value in return for their time is fast becoming one of the most important ways to market them.

Bonus points if you figured out that the embedded video above is a piece of content marketing, as is this blog post.