What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a method of indirect marketing. It applies how online users search for information on the internet, as well as the way they share it. Furthermore, it includes creating online materials relevant to your brand. These can either be in written, video or visual form.

However, content marketing is not about hard selling. You don’t simply say to your potential customers to buy this right now. Also, it’s not all about your brand or products. The focus here is your customers and not you.

Therefore, what you want is to create awareness about your brand by providing them with the information they’ll find valuable. You want to stimulate their interest. Likewise, you have to ensure that they can easily find you online by making them search-engine friendly.

Simply put, content marketing is a promotional tool. You can utilize it to engage your target audience by consistently offering them valuable and useful content that can help or inspire their everyday lives.

Is Content Marketing The Same As Advertising?

Content marketing is a little different from your old-school advertising. Do not think of it as a replacement for advertising or reaching out to your current and new clients. Instead, content marketing help improves your marketing efforts minus the pressure.

The ultimate goal of content marketing is to give information, increase your reach, create brand awareness, and get your name, products, or services out there. It is a long-term effort. But with patience and hard work, you’ll be able to establish yourself as an authority in your niche, and eventually acquire new customers.

The main concept of content marketing is to help consumers find the best possible solution to their problems. So you want them to remember your business when they need to buy something related to your brand, business, niche, industry product, or service. Basically, from a marketer’s point of view, you’re more like an educator rather than of a salesperson.

Types Of Marketing You Can Use For Growing Your Business

Blogging and Guest posting

Blogging is an excellent tool to include in your digital marketing strategy. And the great thing about it is that it’s free. Although establishing a high performing blog may take a while, but it’ll present your business with plenty of opportunities when done correctly.

Along with that, you may consider guest posting or request to be quoted or interviewed on other blogs and sites associated with your expertise or niche. Then, design a media page on your company’s official website and link your article to it. Afterwards, share this page with your customers and prospect via social media.

Contributing to other blogs offers the following benefits:

• Drives awareness to your brand or business by linking it back to your own website
• You’ll be able to maximize your reach by letting new audiences know that you have all the skills and knowledge regarding your industry or niche

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another solid tool to add to your digital marketing arsenal. This will enable you to collect essential information from your target audience while presenting your brand to them. Additionally, you’ll be able to quickly create a relationship with your customers through email marketing. This is a vital element to turn them into paying customers and retain them as well.

Create A Facebook Business Page

Setting up a Facebook business page is a must these days. Regardless of what you’re offering or selling, there’s a strong possibility that Facebook is the place where you’ll find your prospects.

Although the popularity of some social media platforms is increasing, Facebook still beats them when it comes to active users. And we’re talking about more than 2 billion active users here per month!

So if your business has a dedicated Facebook page, you can reach out to your target audience and potential customers more engagingly. You’ll be able to start conversing with them for much deeper engagement.

Video Marketing

Video marketing or vlogging is doing very well right now. That’s because videos enable you to showcase your products, services, or ideas even better than any words could do. You can use all the best adjectives around, but nothing beats seeing the actual product in action.

These days, you’ll see tons of videos on different social media channels where various businesses demonstrate and promote their products or services.

The easiest ways to create video is through the following:

• Facebook Live
• IG TV
• Instagram Story

Creating videos will allow you to showcase a different side of you to your followers. Likewise, this will give your brand a face, which, in turn, provides deep engagement. So make sure to integrate your content marketing strategy with video marketing.

Social Media Graphics

Graphics come in several types. Not only can they provide value to your audience but they’re a superb means for engaging them as well. Some graphics you can use are:

• Tips
• Infographics
• Quotes
• GIFs
• Memes
• Stimulating questions

If you want to appeal to a wider audience, make sure to make the images you post or share diverse. If you’re not good at designing graphics, you can easily create your own with free image design apps for mobile or desktop.

Podcasting

There are a couple of ways on how you can make podcasting a part of your marketing content efforts:

• Start your own podcasting
• Get someone from the podcast world related to your industry interview you

No doubt having your own podcast is great for your brand and building its audience. However, it may take some time for it to gain traction. So instead of jumping right on board, consider appearing on a handful of podcasts first. Then decide if the format is something you’d like.

While starting your own podcast is great for brand and audience building, it can take quite a while to gain traction.

So, rather than immediately jumping into creating a podcast, why not appear on a few podcasts first and decide if you like the format? Given that there are over one million podcasts today, there are plenty of opportunities for you to get interviewed.

eBook

You have two options when planning out your ebook strategy. You can either offer a free ebook or make it available for purchase.

You’re probably scratching your head right now while wondering why you’d want to offer something you spent hours to make for free, right? The answer is plain and simple. Your email list will benefit from it significantly.

For this reason, make sure that whatever topic you have in mind for your eBook, it should correlate to the product or service you’re offering. When you grow your email list, you’ll be able to build a more profound conversation with your soon-to-be customers.