What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the act of creating valuable and relevant content for a specific audience, with the intention of indirectly encouraging a sale, conversion or similar action.

Content that’s created for this type of marketing always serves a purpose. What’s more, it’s the kind of content that your past, present and future customers or clients are actively seeking out.

How does content marketing work?

If you have a product or service that you’re trying to sell, then it’s imperative that you can explain the value of it. If people don’t know why they need what you’re selling, then you may find it difficult to sustain or grow your brand.

By understanding what it is your audience wants and needs to know, you can create content that answers these questions.

When your potential customers or clients are searching online for answers to their questions, they might just find what they’re looking for within your content. And, when this happens, they begin to build trust in your brand.

As they continue to read your content, you have the opportunity to prompt them to learn more about you. This will hopefully lead them to understand why they should do business with you as opposed to one of your competitors.

What kind of content are we talking about?

Conventional content marketing typically focuses around blog posts and other forms of written content. However, in recent years video has also boomed in popularity, as has podcasting. That’s not to mention social media and email newsletters, both of which are incredibly effective ways to reach huge numbers of people.

The best idea is to blend multiple content marketing techniques together to expand your reach and demonstrate your expertise.

For example, you may create written content on your blog in addition to making videos about your business for YouTube – both of which you could circulate to your audience through an email newsletter.

Why is content marketing important?

If you’re someone who is guilty of building a website, creating your social profiles, and then sitting back and waiting for customers or clients to find you, then you’ll definitely want to pay attention now.

The internet is a wildly saturated place. The chances are, no matter how cool or creative your business idea is, somebody has already beat you to it. In fact, hundreds or even thousands of people may even be operating a very similar business to yours.

If you’re not making an effort to drive interest in your brand and to add serious value to your online presence, then you can’t reasonably expect the sales to start pouring in.

Having said that, I do have one client who I believe to be a close exception to this rule. What this person is doing is fairly unique—and they still trust in the power of content marketing to help enhance their brand! I’ll be adding more details of this project to my past and current projects page soon, so do check back if you’re interested to hear about this.

Want to learn more?

If you’ve read this far and you’re excited to know how content marketing could give your business a boost, then contact me anytime to talk more about it.