The Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing
By: Ally Balkey
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSqCzjUBWbU&feature=youtu.be
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is “a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action” (Steimle). It is important to notice some key words in this definition. These are “valuable”, “relevant”, and “consistent”. Out of all three of these important key words. Value is arguably the most important. Customers will only be interested in something that is of value to them. This is something to keep in mind when creating your content marketing strategy. There are many different kinds of content, so there are many different types of content marketing. These include webpages, podcasts, videos, social media, and so many more. You can find details on these types of content marketing here.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is important because it creates customer action and profit. It also creates customer loyalty. Content marketing helps marketers see how the “exposure to content drives an audience through to conversion” (Kintigh). It is important to establish a return on content so marketers know how much to invest in a specific product or service. Content marketing can market a product to an audience that would never consider buying it and make them aware of the product and educating them about it. Ultimately, without content marketing, it would be extremely hard to influence consumers and gain profits.
How To Use Content Marketing
As we know, everyone is different and the world as we know it and the trends change almost daily. With that being said, content marketing will look a different for everyone. It is up to you to answer how and why you want to use it. In short, Who is your target audience? What platforms do they use? What type of content do they want to see? Are you benefiting from this kind of marketing? After answering these questions, you will have a better understanding of how to create the best content marketing for your own brand.
Today, more content marketing mediums exist than ever before. Neil Patel, an English entrepreneur, has been called a one of the top 10 marketers by Forbes Magazine and a top influencer on the web by the wall street journal. He says “The ultimate goal of content marketing, of course, is to grow your business. But again, you can’t do that unless you first attract paying customers.” The first thing to do when using content marketing is to define your target audience. It is important to use and understand audience insights. By doing this, you can then decide which platform and channel to put your advertisement out on. Next, you must create your strategy. Many brands promote themselves by telling their story and/ or showing their values in their campaign while also showing the customer how it will benefit them. Then, you can publish your strategy on the correct platform. Once you have released your campaign, it is important to stay connected with your audience, especially if your content marketing is on social media. For example, like their comments, repost their pictures, or send them an email. Finally, it is very important to analyze your results. Google Analytics is a great platform to use to monitor your success and customers and see which types of content are the most valuable to you.
Below are a few examples of great content marketing.
Coca-Cola
I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this blog has not heard of Coke’s “Share A Coke” campaign. It started in 2011 in Australia when Coca-Cola replaced its logo on the bottle with hundreds of the most popular names. This campaign absolutely went viral around the world and was so successful because of the personalization. Customers were excited to look for Coke bottles that they could not only connect with themselves, but share with their friends. The company made people feel special. Then, they encouraged consumers to share the product on social media. On Instagram alone, the #ShareACoke hashtag has over 657,000 images. Each year, Coca-Cola updated their share a coke campaign to become even more personable. For example, in 2017 they started to add last names to the cans. Their brand director stated “Last names give us an opportunity to invite more people to the campaign. Its just a great way to up the reach” (Schultz).
GoPro
GoPro, known for their high quality action cameras, has done a fantastic job of creating content marketing over the years. It is important to understand what your audience wants to see and where they want to see it. They learned that their customers love to see action packed high quality videos. And being that they sell cameras, YouTube was the perfect channel for them to market on. It also helps that visual content is becoming more powerful each year in content marketing. They now have almost 9 million subscribers.
This is an ad they created to introduce their new black HERO7 camera. Currently, it has over 4 million views on YouTube.
Both of these companies show examples of marketing with the consumer as the best interest in mind. They used a tactic that would interest them on a platform where they would see it. In the end, results showed that these campaigns were huge viral successes.
SEO
The last short tip to have a successful content marketing strategy is to always remember SEO. These two things go hand-in-hand.
“Your keyword search wont do much good unless you use those key words in your content. And, creating content without knowing what your audience is looking for will leave you without any significant traffic” (Moz).
You can learn more about the basics of SEO and why they’re important from this blog post.
Conclusion
In our fast paced, busy, digital world, consumers will not take the time to research or purchase something that they are not interested in. Content marketing only works if the consumer feels as though it will add value to their life. When content marketing is great, profit will naturally come after. Content marketing will continue to become more and more popular as our marketing platforms also continue to grow. That is why it is so important to know what is it and how to use it correctly.
Sources:
“Content Marketing [Learn SEO].” Moz, moz.com/learn/seo/content-marketing.
Kintigh, Luke. “Content Marketing: What You Need to Know.” Ad Age, 9 Jan. 2019, adage.com/article/guest-columnists/content-marketing/315947.
Patel, Neil. “Content Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide.” Neil Patel, 9 Dec. 2019, neilpatel.com/what-is-content-marketing/.
Schultz, E.J. “Why Coke Is Adding Last Names to 'Share a Coke'.” Ad Age, 18 Apr. 2017, adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coke-adding-names-share-a-coke/308678.
Steimle, Josh. “What Is Content Marketing?” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 28 Jan. 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/#5ed0563010b9.