What is content marketing?

Content marketing refers to all types of content that is created so that it can attract, acquire, and engage a clearly specified target market or potential consumer with the aim of driving these potential clients to a specific action that leads to sales. With content marketing, businesses aim at creating unique and valuable content that is relevant, distributing that content to the target audience in a systematic and organized way and measuring the result of the target audience through them reading, thinking over and acting on that content. Content marketing means that businesses must dedicate resources to publish or post content online such as videos, blogs, ebooks and white papers. To achieve tangible results or objectives, businesses must therefore develop a well thought out strategy that will guide their creation and distribution of content. Today, over 33% of marketing budgets is targeted at content marketing. And here are some reasons why. Conventional advertising does not work as well anymore. Surveys now point to new statistics that support content marketing. For instance, over 48% of buy decisions are driven by blog advise. It is now apparent that businesses can no longer rely on conventional forms of advertising and must adopt content marketing.

1. Content is reusable

Well-created and organized content can be relayed to the target audience in various forms and formats for instance, a blog can be syndicated across various blogs, sent out as email, compiled into ebooks or developed into a podcast or video. Not only is this content reusable in different platforms, it is also used over long periods. In an organization, content marketing is also shared and used by different departments to reach their objectives. For instance, sales content can be used by the human capital department train new employees while senior level managers can use this same content in their presentations.

2. Relationship building

Content marketing also helps in relationship building. For instance, by creating a video series that features different clients explaining their unique experiences with your product, it is possible to create more engagement from your customers and elicit more feedback around the created content.

3. Better Ranking

Content marketing is now creating higher rankings on search engine results. Not only is this great for increasing brand awareness across the internet, it is also a quick way to attract new leads continually. Something that a 15 second advert can only do for you when it is aired.

4. Content lives on

Despite the fact that content may have been done once, it remains accessible to new users over long periods of time compared with conventional media.

By Dr. Ataollah Etemadi