An Introduction to Content Marketing.
Updated: Apr 8, 2021
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Marketers are spending more time, money, and resources on content than ever before. Entire marketing departments can be built around #contentmarketing and new job titles, such as Content Managers or Content Writers have started to appear on the recruitment market to source specialists in the field.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
If you think of marketing broken down into “push” and “pull activity”, there has been an undeniable shift towards pull activity or #inbound marketing, which aims to attract customers and convert them over time.
While #outbound marketing, such as trade shows, or direct marketing (email and mailouts) can be effective in generating leads or direct sales, the role of content marketing is closely associated with raising #brand awareness by constantly putting your business at the forefront of your customer’s mind. It’s also a good way to educate the market and build relationships.
Content is largely associated with #organic growth and is integral to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Thus, a carefully hash-tagged blog on a website can increase the #discoverability of your business on google search. Although, SEO is a constant battle, and it can take months of producing content before you begin to rank higher up the results page for your chosen keywords.
Using the relevant social media platforms to publish your content can be a powerful way of reaching new customers and generating more traffic to your website. Social media is also a free form of content marketing and is relatively easy to use.
What is a Content Marketing Plan?
A content marketing plan is a useful, detailed strategic document that can be built around a framework. Its purpose is to help you define and optimise your content marketing efforts so that you get better results.
Content marketing can be broken down into 5 key pillars:
1. Purpose and #goals – Why are you creating content? What value will it bring? What do you want your audience to do after they have consumed your content? These goals should be aligned with your wider marketing and business objectives.
2. #Target #audience – who are you creating the content for and how will this benefit them? Customer profiling will help you to build a picture of your customers so that you can adapt your content and make it more relevant.
3. #Story – what specific, unique and valuable ideas will you build your content pieces around? How will you differentiate yourself from the competition?
4. Process – how will you structure and manage your operations to activate your plans? There are many tools on the market to help you #automate social media, for example.
5. Measurement - How will you gauge performance and #optimise efforts? What #metrics will you use and how will you test and adapt your content so that it performs better in future?
This article is part of a series of pieces on content marketing.