Content marketing is a type of online marketing strategy that focuses on creating, publishing, and sharing valuable content in an attempt to attract audiences and convert them into buyers. The type of content created for content marketing purposes can include:
- Blog articles,
- Videos,
- Infographics,
- Social posts,
- Guides,
- Reports,
- Ebooks,
- Newsletters,
- Webinars,
- Podcasts, and more.
Content marketing isn’t intended to be overly promotional. It should simply provide reliable, helpful, and interesting content that attracts readers. Usually, the content will be relevant to the product/service the business is promoting, and demonstrate a benefit to the readers. Content marketing also helps to increase views of a given page, helping to strengthen a website’s position in search engine results. Search engines often value high-quality text and content, making content marketing sometimes more valuable in increasing search engine visibility than even SEO.
When creating content for content marketing, you need to have a clear idea of who the target audience is and what their interests are. After defining your audience, you can create a piece of content that they will find valuable, interesting, and potentially share-worthy. Content marketing is now one of the most important branches of digital marketing. It has proven to be extremely effective in converting customers, and is considered to be more affordable than other traditional forms of marketing. In an age where consumers are wary of promotional & direct marketing, content marketing is a way to draw audiences in while providing useful and relevant content that they find interesting.
In short, the benefits of content marketing are:
- Promoting your business and its products/services,
- Emphasising the benefits of your product/service to your target audience,
- Building online awareness of your brand & distinguishing it from competitors,
- Increasing traffic to your website,
- Strengthening your website’s position in search engine rankings, and
- Acquiring new customers.