A lot of what we do here falls under the umbrella of “content marketing.” We may not always identify it as such … as in, “hey, this post is part of our content marketing strategy.” You, dear reader, might take offense at that … after all, who wants to be marketed to?
Content marketing is first and foremost about providing valuable content. It can take the shape of words, images, video, audio … your only limit is your own imagination. “Valuable” is the operative word here. Shouting “buy my stuff” across every available media is not content marketing. No, most of us consider that tactic to be “spam.”
On the other hand, when a company or an individual provides me with the information I’m looking for, I take notice. If they do so repeatedly, they become a trusted information source. If that trusted source, later on, offers me a relevant product that meets my needs, they’ll likely make the sale. This is the heart of content marketing.
Joe Pulizzi of Junta42.com defines it like this:
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Your blog and/or newsletter, your comments on other blogs, profiles on social media sites, involvement in social networking, articles published off-site, even the articles you bookmark … all of these activities are pieces to the content marketing puzzle. Each activity contributes toward the end goal of driving interested visitors to your site. None of the pieces are highly effective standing alone. But used together, they form a picture of your company (otherwise known as your brand) while providing useful, relevant information to your target audience.
For the micro-business owner, content marketing helps you establish credibility in the eyes of your customers and prospects, while driving sales of your product or service. For the organization, content marketing helps spread awareness of your cause. And for the larger business, well, many are already aware of the benefits. Put simply, it works.
So what’s holding you back? A lack of time to do it yourself? Don’t know what to write about? Don’t know how to go about it? Or are you already engaged in content marketing? (We’d love to hear your success story!
Content marketing is basically the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. Instead of promoting your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent.
Blogging is supposedly content marketing but from what we see in most blogs today I think content marketing needs to be redefined!
I’m always telling my clients that if they want links to their site they should start by creating a compelling website with useful and interesting content. It’s so much easier to carry out link building when a site has great content!
I agree with the comment about content marketing needing redefinition when it comes to blogging. There are some pretty ridiculous attempts out there. Bottom line though, do the poor versions get your business? They don’t get mine. That’s exactly where the credibility comes into play. I’m not interested in getting beaten over the head with super sales tactics from a coach for a million dollars, I’m interested in improving my game. SO many social networking sites forget that its a real turn off to be CONSTANTLY inundated with superficial offerings that are only meant to be up-sold to a much more expensive, and often unnecessary product.
Effective content marketing is NOT big hype, its constant, relevant, helpful information conveyed with authority.
[...] marketing?” As my mentor and co-worker, Shari Voigt, pointed out so well in her post to Express Marketing Memo, it’s the many ways you present yourself interactively online. In order for you to be useful, [...]
A very nice blog. You have given a lot of information about content marketing which is new to me.
I still think that even though writing needs to be more than just readable.. i.e. engaging and fun, to actually make money you need to think about calls to action, or funnelling traffic to your buying pages. But of course if your writing sucks your visitors will not last long..
It is said that good content is like oxygen for any website to survive in such a competitive era. A very nice post
Thanks for such a valuable and informative post. I think I am lacking in content marketing because, I put in a fair amount of SEO in my Blog and even the readers turn up, But they don’t write enough comments as expected.
A very nice post. Good content is similar to the soul in the body, good content keeps the web site alive.
Thanks, Aditya