Introduction to Content Marketing: What, Why and How

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is a systematic approach to marketing and promoting your business using your own ‘content’. The main objective of Content Marketing is to create and distribute useful, relevant and valuable content to attract your potential customers towards your business.

We can define content as information and divide it into different forms like Text, Infographics, Audios, and Videos. The other purpose of Content Marketing is to help you in getting more conversions on your website.

Content Marketing is also useful for Social Media Marketing, SEO, PPC, and Inbound Marketing because all these activities require content of good quality. The good quality of your content can help you to attract more prospects and to convert them into your future customers.

You can share content related to your business and industry to educate and inform your target audience about your business. Content Marketing is a good tool to improve your brand credibility and visibility among your customers.

Different types of Content:

There are four major types of content, which are Text, Infographics, Videos, and Audios.

1. Text: It is the most common form of content that is used by most of the people in their content marketing strategy to promote their business. It includes the following:

(a.) Blogs: Blogging is a very common type of content that most people use today. It is a great way to share information related to your business and products. The blog could be related to a certain category like Fashion, Health, Fitness and Sports. Your content marketing blog can help you to drive more relevant traffic to your website. It is also very useful for your SEO content marketing. You can simply use your content blog to promote your business.

(b.) Case Studies: Case studies are the stories of your customers that show how your products and services helped your customers to solve their problems. It is very useful for creating your brand voice and trust with your potential customers and existing customers. You can create a case study by sharing an example of your customer, like how your services helped them to solve their problem.

(c.) eBooks: The eBook is a very effective way to promote your brand with information related to your business. You can create an eBook of about 5 to 10 pages, in which you can promote your brand with information. It is important to share useful and relevant information in eBooks or content books. Your audience will download this eBook to get information and it will help you to promote your brand with eBook.

(d.) Others: Some of the other types of content that are in use these days are Whitepaper, Checklist and Memes.

2. Infographics: Infographics are an important part of Content Marketing because it is very useful for sharing your information and content on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It is an effective way of promoting content for your business through visualization. It is also very helpful for attracting the attention of your audience towards your business and brand.

3. Videos: The consumption or demand for video content is increasing day by day. The demand for video content will be very high in the coming years. To catch the attention of your audience you need to produce videos that are innovative and engaging for your audience. People like to view and share more engaging video, thus you need to create more engaging videos for your audience. You can use YouTube video marketing to promote your videos.

4. Audios: The most common form of audio content is a Podcast. The demand for podcasts is very high. The podcast is a digital audio file that contains some useful information that a user can download to listen to. It could be an individual podcast or series of podcasts. The main purpose of the podcast is to share valuable information in the form of audio that the users can listen.

Why use Content Marketing

Increase your brand visibility: Content Marketing can help you to increase your brand visibility through your content branding. It is a great tool to promote your brand on different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You can create different types of content for different platforms like Text for LinkedIn and Twitter, Infographics for Facebook and Instagram to increase your brand visibility.

Improve brand awareness and recognition: You can use Content Marketing to improve your brand awareness among your target audience. Content creates awareness about your brand. Your creative content will help you to catch the attention of your audience. You can develop creative and innovative content for your audience. It will attract more attention to the people and improve your brand awareness and recognition.

Better engagement with customers: You can improve your customer engagement using Content Marketing. Now, what is engaging means? Engaging means interact with your audience and take their view on any topic. It is important to develop engaging content for your audience to get better customer engagement. You can use short stories and funny images to develop engaging content for your audience. Your customers will engage with the content that they find interesting.

Boost your website traffic: Content Marketing can boost traffic to your website. You just need to create the content of good quality and share it on different social media platforms. You can create links in Articles or Blogs to drive more traffic to your website. You can also use Text and Infographics to attract more traffic from social media with your content. Your content will help you to drive a good quantity of traffic to your website.

Get more conversions: The good quality content will help you to attract more potential customers to your website and it will increase the chances of conversions on your website. You can get more conversions through sharing the engaging content with your audience and inform them about your business, product, and services. You can also help your audience by answering their queries through your content.

How to use Content Marketing

It is important to learn how you can use Content Marketing for your business. It is a simple process that anyone can follow to use content to promote business, brand, product, and services.

Understand your Target Audience: It is important to develop a good understanding of your target audience. You need to understand who is looking for your content or interested in your information. You can define your target audience based on Age, Gender, Education and Income. It will help you to create relevant and useful content for your audience. You can define your target audience as per your business, product, and services.

Create useful & relevant content: It is very important to create useful and relevant content for your audience. Your strategy of content marketing will help you to get more conversions only if your audience will find your content useful for themselves. Creation of content that is relevant for your audience, is important to attract more new customers and to retain the existing customers with useful updates of your business.

Inform & educate your audience: Content is a good form of communication with your audience. You can share informational content with your audience to educate them about your business, product, and services. You can use content to inform your target audience about new updates of your product and services. Your content can help your audience to understand and learn more about your business.

Share your content on social media: Social media is the best place to promote your content among your target audience. Social media content marketing is a very effective way to promote your content. You can use different social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and LinkedIn. It depends upon your content strategy, which platform is good for your business. Different social media platform are good for different content like Facebook & Instagram is good for Infographics and LinkedIn & Twitter is good for Text content.

Analyze the results: Finally, you can analyze the results of your content marketing. You can use analytics tools of different social media platforms and Google Analytics to analyze the results on your website. You can check the increase in traffic on your website by analyzing content. Analysis of results will help you to improve your content marketing strategy.

Final words:

Content Marketing is a great way to promote your business today on social media. You can use different types of content to promote your business like Blogs, Case studies, eBooks, White paper, Infographics, Videos, and Podcasts. You can start by understanding your the audience, creating useful content for your audience, sharing your content on social media and finally analyze the results for improvement in your content marketing strategy.

Content Marketing provides benefits like better brand visibility, better customer engagement, and more inbound traffic on your website and more conversions. It is simple to use content to promote your business, you can write Blogs, create Infographics and Videos. The cost of Content Marketing is also very low as compared to other marketing tools like SEM and PPC. Thus, Content Marketing is an important part of your business and Digital Marketing strategy.

By: Abhishek Panwar

Subscribe and Like – Digital Creative Mind – for more updates about Digital Marketing.

Share your valuable comments for better updates.