What is Content Marketing?
You’ve likely seen the words “content marketing” on marketing blogs as something you should be doing to boost your business. While it’s true that content marketing can have powerful effects on your business, let’s start with the basics. What is content marketing exactly, and how can it help your company?
What is content marketing?
If you ask Google to define content marketing, it will tell you that, “content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online material that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.”
While all that is true, Google’s definition doesn’t quite give you the full picture on content marketing.
The Volume Nine definition reads a bit more like this: “content marketing is the creation and sharing of online content meant to solve problems for and build trust with a defined audience, driving sales, lowering marketing costs, and increasing brand recognition.”
Content marketing encompasses all written, visual, video, and audio content that you put online to represent your brand. Content can refer to blog posts, evergreen content, infographics, testimonial videos, audio guides, quizzes – the list goes on.
Why is content marketing so vital to your digital marketing strategy?
The answer has many facets, as the beneficial effects of good content marketing can be seen in almost every area of a digital marketing strategy. From SEO and analytics to paid advertising and user experience, content marketing informs and improves your overall digital strategy.
SEO: Search engines reward sites that produce consistently valuable content for their
Users. Frequently creating high-quality content for your company’s site will help search engines to recognize your site as an authority, increasing your site’s ranking. Be sure that all content you create is optimized to maximize SEO impact.
Paid Advertising: By keeping a close eye on how your content is received, and by whom, you gain valuable (and free) insight into how to implement new strategies in paid advertising.
Analytics: With the litany of tools available to track the success of your content, you can make informed decisions on what kind of content you can create in the future to continue to attract organic traffic to your site.
User Experience: Content marketing keeps you focused on what your users care about. Tailoring your company’s messaging to your users will help your customers develop loyalty with your brand and view you as a thought leader in your industry.
How does content marketing drive sales and brand recognition?
By providing content that people want to share, you share your brand in one of the most valuable ways possible. Instead of slamming prospects with messages they never chose to receive, your message is being delivered by a friend or a trusted brand.
Content marketing drives sales by taking advantage of everyone’s natural tendency to prefer buying products and services from someone they trust. It shows consumers—without appearing too salesy—new products and services to solve their problems, while also providing them with valuable information about their query.
Additionally, by creating valuable informational blog posts that align with your brand, you’ll be driving organic traffic to your blog, thus increasing the number of users that come to your site, brand recognition and, ultimately, sales.
In essence, content marketing is a new way of marketing that better aligns the goal of the customer with the goal of the business. If you’re wondering if you should include content marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy, the answer is a resounding “yes”, no matter your business or industry.
Still have questions about content marketing? We understand—it’s a lot to take in. Set up a time to talk about content marketing strategies with the team at Volume Nine!
