What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is defined by none other than the Content Marketing Institute as “a strategic marketing approach 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”. In layman’s terms, content marketing is more than just pitching and disseminating information about your products. Going back to the definition of content marketing, the words – valuable, relevant, and consistent content differentiate it from traditional advertising. You could be watching an advertisement about an interesting product, but how valuable and relevant is the information to you? That’s the million dollar question content marketers want to solve. They want to identity what you value as a consumer and as a person, and how they can deliver content that matters to you. The beauty of content marketing is that it also appeals to a greater audience profile than the originally intended audience.
To put in into perspective, Content Marketing Institute has a great list of successful examples of content marketing. My favorite happens to be a Coca-Cola campaign where it ingeniously adds sentimental value to a cheap drink by printing a variety of common names on the bottle’s label. This effectively makes the drink more personal and special to you as a product. You’ve heard or even came across situations where people would scour the Coca-Cola inventory at stores that has their name. Don’t be shy to admit you’ve done it as well. It’s an extremely effective marketing strategy that appealed not only to loyal customers and but also to new audiences. To pinpoint in simple words what Coca-Cola did and how it relates to content marketing, is that they identified what you value as a person – your identity – and made it available for all of the world. Coca-Cola buyers found a sense of self-worth through a simple branding tactic. This example is one of the unique ways content marketers provide valuable and relevant content to their audiences.
Why Is Content Marketing Being Used?
Reading the previous section, you can already guess that content marketing is an extremely important part of marketing strategy as a whole! The ultimate goal of content marketing is generating a unique relationship between the audiences. Once the audience’s attention is captured, then the chances of converting them into loyal customers skyrockets. Read the definition again and highlight the phrase ‘to drive profitable customer action’. How exactly did Coca-Cola turn their content marketing strategy into a profitable venture? ‘Profitable’ in this sense applies to more than just an increase in sales. The phrase ‘profitable customer action’ can be interpreted as elated buyers of Coca-Cola bottles uploading and sharing their ‘personalized’ purchase through social media. The customers eventually turned into Coca-Cola’s marketers themselves! The customers ‘acted’ upon a manner that brought more profit to Coca-Cola, without the company investing in extra marketing costs.
How Do You Maximize The Potential of Your Content?
Answering this question depends on what your classification is as a content creator and service provider. For businesses and companies, you’re focused on providing valuable and relevant information about your products and services that can enrich your audience’s sense of value and even personal growth. If you’re a website developer, then you’d rather be focused on providing valuable and relevant content to your audiences. Website developers or physical businesses that own a business website might be better off optimizing their content for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). It’s efficient and highly recommended marketing strategy in making your content appear as one of the prime results in your audience’s search entries. SEO essentially is a process that allows ‘natural’ traffic to lead to your content. One of the ways is to create search engine friendly titles that specific audiences want and will search for. Publishing guest posts on trustworthy websites to ensure your content, has a higher chance of being found is another way to leverage content marketing.
Whichever way you choose to use content marketing, just remember that promoting your website from scratch takes a lot of homework and will have some expense as well. In essence, whatever strategy you may employ, let the words ‘valuable’ and ‘relevant’ be the central pillar to your content marketing strategy and you will be well on your way to leveraging loyal traffic and customer for your brand.
