Content marketing is what you write about your business beyond your direct marketing material. It includes press releases, blogs on your own website and others, website content and more. The idea is to get a customer interested in your brand as a whole, not to try and sell a particular product or service.
The theory around content marketing is to create genuinely interesting, informative or entertaining pieces that your customers want to read. It helps to secure your place in your customers’ minds as a trusted and relatable brand, and is also a great way to attract new potential customers to your business.
Types of content marketing
Content creation can take many forms, including blogs, articles and emails. Whatever form it takes, it’s all an opportunity to share more about your business. Whether it’s a look behind the scenes, sharing a trade secret or advice about how to care for a product or make full use of a service, they are all ways to demonstrate your business values and personality.
This allows people to make a more emotional connection with your brand – they will enjoy hearing from you, will trust what you tell them and will use you as a source of information. Therefore, when they come to make a purchase, you’re the business they’re likely to turn to.
Benefits of content marketing
People have a real interest in the stories behind a business – they don’t just want to hear about the products or services you sell, they want to know why you sell it, where it comes from and what they can do with it.
Content marketing allows you to answer all these questions in a way which is engaging to your existing and potential customers, but also benefits you as it drives traffic to your website and allows you to demonstrate why you’re the best at what you do.
Making the most of your content
The skill in content marketing comes in finding that sweet spot between outright advertising and providing content which is valuable for your readers, but which also draws them closer to you. This is where a content marketing consultant will come in. They can advise you on relevant topics, use the right tone of voice and keywords throughout your content, and track the success of pieces you have already shared.
Using a specialist content creation service will ensure your content is delivered in the best possible way, such as making sure it’s easy to read on the page, or that search engines can find your key points easily.
An online marketing expert can also help you put together a content marketing plan – for this kind of marketing to have the greatest impact, there needs to be a steady flow of content. Writing a couple of pieces and then stopping won’t help your business in the long-term; it takes a while for your audience to build that connection with you.
A plan also ensures consistency in the type of content you’re producing while avoiding duplication (or a last-minute panic when you realise you haven’t written anything for a while!).
Content marketing experts can spot other opportunities for these pieces too. They’re great for your own website and messaging channels, but it can also have a big positive impact if your content is featured somewhere else. Appearing on another website, for example, implies an endorsement from the website owner and exposes your brand to a whole new potential customer base.
Outsource Your Marketing
A well-written piece of content marketing may well encourage people to invest in your product or service, but the main aim is to encourage your customers – past, present or future – to engage with your brand, whether that’s through buying something now, recommending you to others or by having you in the forefront of their minds when they have a problem you can solve.
To discuss what forms of content marketing could work well for your business, outsourcing content writing and creating a content marketing plan, get in touch.