Know All About Content Marketing

In today's world, traditional marketing has become far less persuasive than it once was. Traditional methods have been outdated, and especially after quarantine, digital consumption has boomed drastically, decreasing the face for out of home and print ads.

4 Minutes Read

Here enters content marketing: a way to provide your audience engaging content while increasing conversions, raising brand awareness, boosting revenue and more at the cost of zero expenses.

But what is content marketing exactly? And where do you even start implementing? Let’s take a deep dive into the knowledge ocean of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

To understand content marketing, first, you need to know about the traditional marketing approach. TV, Print, Radio, Out of Home are advertising mediums and have dominated the market for centuries. But with the advancement of digital consumption, the average customer has moved to digital mediums like smartphone and computer screens. Traditional shopping has been partially replaced by online shopping, and even the services and consultation have come to virtual platforms. That's where content marketing comes into play.

According to the definition of content marketing, "Content marketing is 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."

So instead of selling your products or services through bombarding media, you're providing useful and relevant content to your prospect customers to help them out and solve their issues. It can also be said that it is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a relationship with your prospects.

Why Invest in Content Marketing? Or What is the ROI of Content Marketing?

If executed in a good way, content creates brand equity. A brand becomes more valuable over time as you continue to create valuable content. The audience appreciates your content and follows your brand as a leader in the respective field; this creates a flywheel effect where you start to generate more and more momentum until suddenly, you're dominating your field.

The content provides value to your business through organic traffic. People start discovering you on search platforms like Google and Youtube and look forward to your opinions on respective matters.

It's literally different from other kinds of traffic on digital medium for one important reason — you are creating a loyal audience base. These people are actively searching for information related to subjects business and when in need of opinions, they come to your content.

It is a great way to create followers and spread awareness about your core product. Even this piece of content (this blog) is a part of the content marketing paradigm. This blog is teaching you something for free. Plus, on the website, you can find different blogs about advertising and marketing technology, and everything is free.

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Best Practices for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you know content marketing is a good method of advertising and promotion, you need to create a strategy to implement the best practices in content marketing. Here they go:

A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers. In simple words, you are building relationships and solving problems by providing helpful content.

Slice the content into three parts: Awareness, Consideration and Decision. In other words, content should be staged to provide awareness about your brand- what is it about? How does it work? Then comes the consideration stage- how the brand will benefit? What are its uses? Why should someone consider the brand? And lastly, there is the decision stage: how is it better than the competitor? Why should someone only choose you?

But before you start pumping out content like a machine-based on the stages mentioned above, you need to do three things:

1. Determine who your customer is (Demographics, Geographics, etc.)
2. Figure out what information they need (Their problems)
3. Choose how to say it (Style of writing or elocution)

What are the Types of Content Marketing?

The most common type of content marketing is blog posting. Blogs can contain a wide variety of content on their own, with plenty of ways to draw more traffic to your site. A blog is where most of your evergreen content will be. E.g. The blog you are reading right now is a content marketing type. You are reading it because it interests you and the subject intrigues you. Plus, it is free on the internet.

Other content types include videos, infographics, white papers, articles, social media posts, e-books, etc. Based on these types, you can decide your plan of action to execute various types of content marketing strategies.

Related Post - 9 Reasons Why Content Marketing Should Be Part of Your Marketing Plan

Content Marketing Strategies For 2021

There's a reason Seth Godin calls content marketing "the only marketing left" - it's authentic, useful, and perfectly suited for the internet generation. But which strategies to choose in 2020. Here is a list to help you out:

1. Results-focused content
2. Video and live-stream take centre stage
3. User and search intent drives content creation
4. Conversational marketing continues to evolve
5. Content gets tailored to voice search and smart devices
6. Personalized content gets a shot of steroids
7. Podcasts keep catching on
8. Topic-focused content to build authority
9. The battle for the snippet
10. Data-driven content creation

At The Bottom

We hope that by now, you feel a bit better with the decisions you need to make on a content marketing level. This blog is a brief overview of what content marketing is all about. There is a lot of fish to explore in this ocean, and only hands-on experience will teach you that.

So let us know in the comment section below- What has worked for you in terms of content marketing so far? What hasn't worked and why?

In case you face any problems then do reach out to our experts at Seagull Advertising one of the best advertising agencies in India. We will help you out with all your queries regarding digital marketing.