The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing 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, drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing complements performance marketing by providing potential customers with materials, videos, blogs, and related content. Rather than pushing marketing messages (performance marketing), the idea is to pull them in with engaging, relevant, and helpful content.
Content marketing also provides a pathway to nurture and create long-term relationships with current and prospective customers. For example, a would-be customer subscribing to your blog post may not need your services today, but if they do in six months or a year, they will most likely come to your company.
HubSpot defines content marketing as a tactical approach to lead generation. It describes it as “the publishing of written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business.” The core motion around content marketing is to create the content.
Content marketing works across the marketing funnel to build brand awareness, drive consideration, and ultimately aid in conversion.
The illustration below outlines the types of content by stages of the marketing funnel:
Before you determine the right mix of content types, it is essential to understand the key attributes of the content itself:
Value-Driven Content: The foundation of content marketing is creating content that your audience finds valuable. Content should also be varied and novel, including blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and infographics.
Consistency: Successful content marketing requires a consistent output of high-quality content. Consistency keeps your brand top of mind for prospective and current customers.
Audience-Centric Approach: Tailor content to your target audience’s needs, interests, and pain points.
Channel Strategy: Creating high-quality content is only helpful if prospective and current customers are still looking for it. Understand where your customers consume media and deliver the content they want to those channels (e.g., YouTube or Facebook).
Long-Term Focus: Content marketing is not performance marketing and is concerned with long-term investment in producing consistent, valuable content.
The primary purpose of content creation should be to help your audience and provide valuable information that delights, educates, and informs. What your target audience is searching for and wants to consume is the standing point of an effective content marketing strategy.
Before developing content, there are two critical questions to answer:
Your audience is critically important. Are you writing for lawyers? Real Estate professionals? Are you creating content to influence multiple stakeholders in your typical B2B buying committee? Before you create content, it is necessary to define your audience. By understanding your audience, you also know where to reach them, which will provide insight into the types of content. For example, if your goal is to educate lawyers on your software to streamline their workload management and your research uncovers your audience spends considerable time on YouTube, then creating a video (in addition to a long-form blog post) may be the best strategy.
The first decision is to determine your audience and, by extension, where and how they consume content. The next step is keyword research to understand what and how they search for your products and services. Moz, a leader in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, defines keyword research as “the practice of identifying the words and phrases people use to find things via search engines like Google.”
For example, the product may be a “workload management system” that helps law firms manage attorneys’ and associates’ time across client projects. But is that how your target audience searches? Keyword research may identify the standard search term, “what software is available to manage attorney time and workload.” Understanding how your customers search is crucial. Often, customer searches describe the problem they seek to solve instead of assigning a name to an existing product or service.
Once you determine your audience, what they are searching for, how they search, and the type of content you want to create, the next step is understanding how to make the content.
E-E-A-T is a framework Google uses to assess content quality, reliability, and helpfulness. The framework categorizes and ranks content across four dimensions:
Experience
Expertise
Authoritativeness
Trustworthiness
Let’s examine each of these in further detail:
Content marketing can help improve brand awareness, reach customers at scale, and ultimately grow your business. The average person is exposed to 4,000 to 10,000 ads per day. This bombardment, coupled with the rise of ad-blocking software, means the competition for your audience’s attention is not only fierce but also that end users are rebelling against push marketing.
Performance marketing is critical to your overall integrated marketing strategy. Budget, marketing goals, product roadmap, etc., will determine the optimal mix of content and performance marketing.
Content marketing is a cost-effective way to reach target customers, but it also helps build credibility and lower your paid advertising costs. Let’s explore more:
Builds Trust, Credibility, and Brand Authority.
By consistently providing valuable information, you position your brand as an authority in your industry. Regularly created content helps build trust with your audience, making them more likely to turn to you when they need products or services in your field.
Improves Brand Awareness and Recognition.
Regular, high-quality content keeps your brand visible and top-of-mind for your audience. As your content is shared and consumed, it can also expand your market reach.
Supports Other Digital Marketing Efforts.
Content powers many other digital marketing strategies. It provides material for social media marketing, improves SEO efforts, and gives substance to email marketing campaigns.
Generates Leads and Conversions.
Content that is helpful and valuable to your target audience can be used to guide them through your sales process. By providing information to customers based on where they are in their journey, content marketing can generate leads and convert customers.
Cost-Effective in the Long Run.
While creating high-quality content requires an initial investment of time and resources, it can continue to attract and engage audiences long after it’s published.
Enhances Customer Engagement and Loyalty.
You create a deeper connection with your audience by providing value beyond your products or services. Engagement fosters loyalty and can turn customers into brand advocates.
Provides Valuable Customer Insights.
Content marketing can help you understand your audience’s preferences, pain points, and behaviors. This information can inform product development, customer service improvements, and future marketing strategies.
Content marketing is a strategy that enhances other marketing efforts, particularly pay-per-click advertising. To learn more about PPC Advertising, check out RevEng’s Whitepaper.
Content marketing generates leads, provides brand awareness, and adds value to a company’s products and services; however, it works best with other marketing strategies.
Content marketing is not just about creating and distributing content; when done effectively, it can be a powerful driver of business growth. Here’s how content marketing can help expand your business:
