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. It aims to drive profitable customer action by providing useful online content that addresses the needs and desires of your target audience.
Content marketing is important because it builds trust with your audience, helps you rank higher in search engine results, and drives decision-making. By providing helpful and relevant content, you engage your audience, establish your business as an industry leader, and over time, encourage conversion. For content marketing small businesses, it’s a cost-effective way to level the playing field.
Creating a content marketing plan involves several steps. First, you need to define your content marketing goals and understand your buyer persona. Then, brainstorm content ideas that would be helpful for your audience. Decide on the types of content you’ll produce and the platforms you’ll use to distribute it. Use content marketing tools for scheduling and tracking your content. Finally, make sure to evaluate and adjust your strategy based on performance. As a content strategy agency, we can guide you through these steps, helping you avoid common content marketing mistakes.
Content marketing drives sales by providing valuable information that helps your audience understand your products or services better and aids them in their purchasing decision. By producing content that resonates with your audience, you can build strong relationships, foster trust, and ultimately, drive them to action. Successful content also helps you rank higher in search results, bringing more traffic to your site and leading to more potential sales.
Content marketing examples can range from blog posts, infographics, and videos to webinars, eBooks, and podcasts. User-generated content marketing, such as customer reviews or social media posts made by your customers, can also be powerful. Even email newsletters can be a part of your content marketing strategy.
While content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) are closely intertwined, they are different. Content marketing is focused on creating and distributing valuable content to attract a target audience, while SEO is about optimizing that content, along with other elements of your website, to rank better in search engine results. You could say content marketing is more about the content production, while SEO is about ensuring that the produced content gets found by users.
Curated content refers to the practice of finding, organizing, and sharing high-quality content created by others, on a specific topic for your audience. It’s a way to provide valuable content to your audience without solely relying on producing all new content. Content curation can complement your content production strategy and offers a great way to engage with other relevant industry experts.