The Basics of Content Marketing
What it is and why it's important
**Note: This post is part of a larger series on Content Marketing which will be posted on Amazon in the form of an Ebook.**
Who needs Content for their business anyway? Isn’t content just something on the periphery of the primary efforts of the sales and advertising team in pushing the bottom line?
In short — NO. Content marketing is at the center of any business and is possibly the most important way to build trust and move a buyer through a sales funnel until they’re finally converted into a dedicated paying customer.
What is Content Marketing?
The specific definition of content marketing is that it’s “[a] strategic marketing a business process 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.”
But in layman’s terms, this means adding value to your audience through strategic content creation over time. If you understand content marketing then you can not only build trust and empathy within your audience, but you can also drive action and results. Content Marketing can be an effective way to build an email list, sell low-ticket items, and send viewers to a landing page where they’ll give you their information (email, name, etc) in exchange for your information (content that solves their problems.)
Brief History of Content Marketing
Content marketing has blown up in recent years among internet businesses, but this idea dates back 100+ years to the turn of the 20th century.
In 1895, John Deere published its first issue of The Furrow, a magazine designed to help farmers improve their business and make their properties more profitable. The Furrow didn’t push advertisements of their product onto the consumer, instead, they focused only on the needs and desires of farmers in order to be as valuable as possible. They forged a relationship of trust and dependence and positioned themselves as the thought-leader in the farming industry for decades to come.
By 1912 The Furrow reached 4 million readers and is the prime example of content marketing to date. Showing the power of providing value over shoving advertisements down the consumer’s throat in order to create sales.
From then onward many companies like Michellin, Proctor & Gamble and Lego utilized content marketing before the turn of the 21st century and the internet age with various publications and magazines.
Content Marketing in Modern Times
Today content marketing has become easier than ever with the rise of the internet. Instead of putting together a magazine and sending it out to the addresses of all your customers you can now publish any form of content at the push of a button.
Magazines and publications have turned into email lists, social media feeds, and podcasts.
But even though it’s become much easier, the foundational ideas behind content marketing have remained much the same. The only way to succeed in content marketing has continued to be a strategy that relies on adding value and empathizing with your audience, building trust, and forming a relationship with your audience in a sometimes deeply-personal way.
Today content marketing is turning towards storytelling and invoking emotion through content. You should aim to inspire your audience and make them feel like you understand them, possibly more than they understand themselves.
Different Mediums to Publish On
There are dozens of different mediums on which you can publish content nowadays. Such as:
- Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
- Podcasts (dozens of different apps people can listen on)
- Youtube (for those focusing on video marketing)
- Blog (including guest posts on other sites)
- Amazon (if you’re focusing on ebooks)
- Courses (through Udemy or hosted on your very own website)
Any of these mediums can and will work for your business if you’re committed and develop a sufficient strategy to overcome any of the challenges you may face along the way.
The most widely respected medium for content marketing is blogging. Every content strategy revolves around writing great articles that solve a specific problem your audience faces. But there’s no reason to limit your entire content strategy to blogging alone. Other mediums such as podcasts, courses, and social media are growing at a lightning-fast rate while blogging is starting to flatten out. This doesn’t mean that blogging isn’t necessary, but that blogging now can be used to link to other deliverables such as an ebook, course, podcast, or email drip-campaign that you created.
Content marketing is becoming more saturated and to survive in the modern market you need to work smarter not harder than your competition. So be smart, write epic shit, and in the end realize that it’s all about the customer’s needs(and their problems) over the needs of your business(the bottom line.)
