An Introduction to Content Marketing

Here are answers to 6 basic questions about the term "content marketing". This is the latest in my series about marketing strategies in today's digital world.

1. What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is the creation, curation and distribution of high-quality content that is valuable, relevant and designed to engage your audience – customers, users or prospects. Content marketing is essentially the presentation of stories that are told in a variety of formats to attract, engage and retain customers and likely clients.

2. What is the goal of content marketing?

The goal is to understand your customers and prospects in order to grow your business, and ultimately create a profitable relationship with your audience. Your goals should serve as the north star of any content initiative.

3. What are the different content types?

E-books, white papers, newsletters, blogs, vlogs, FAQs, webinars, podcasts, infographics, how-to guides, case studies, slides and user gen content are some of the ways content is created and presented. In addition, in today’s digital world, content is also presented through social media, live video, and commercials.

4. Why is content marketing important?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, there are three valuable benefits to content marketing. First, it leads to increased sales because the content you provide is valuable, timely, and relevant. Secondly, it results in costs savings and thirdly, it creates a more loyal customer base that finds your information valuable and useful. Today content marketing is a necessary part of any marketing strategy.

5. Does content marketing work?

Content marketing can be very effective when your content addresses your customers’ challenges and needs throughout the different stages of the customer journey. When you create content that address customer motivations your chances of engaging with and converting your prospect increases.

6. How can you measure the impact of Content Marketing?

Each organization has to decide what’s meaningful for it and prioritize its goals. For example, one company’s content goal may be to improve brand awareness while another may prioritize lead generation or sales. If the goal is to improve brand awareness, valuable metrics could be website visits, page and document views, social media posts, shares and opinions about the brand, video views and downloads. If the main goal is sales, then the metrics would likely be online and offline sales. If the goal is customer retention, then customer renewal rates will be a valuable metric to measure if the relevant content has had an impact on customer loyalty. Another way to measure and track content is to think carefully about key performance indicators (KPIs) for each type of content – blogs and articles, videos, email, podcasts and social media. For example, podcast effectiveness can be measured by tracking subscribers, downloads, audience growth, shares and listeners’ reviews and ratings.

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