Why content marketing is key to digital marketing
In a nutshell, content marketing is the creation and sharing of educational content with the express purpose of attracting, engaging and acquiring potential clients and customers.
It’s also helpful in terms of the ongoing nurturing of existing client relationships.
And, done well, it acts as the pivotal hub for your digital marketing
Basically, instead of selling your products or services you’re providing information to make your target market more intelligent – the theory being that if we give valuable information, customers will reward us by their business and their loyalty.
You’ll see the shorthand for this described as “help not sell”
There’s some sound reasoning behind this, think how adept we are at skipping advertisements. We flick past them in magazines and forward fast them on TV – what stops us is something that we feel is relevant and interesting.
So here are the first three things to consider:
- You need to understand your target audience or you won’t know what they find relevant
- You need to put together something which is not the same old same old.
- You need to construct it in a way which is engaging – or it won’t be interesting and it won’t be passed on by your website visitors to their contacts.
It’s an intriguing concept isn’t it? Imagine your target audience actually looking forward to receiving your marketing!?
Of course this is nothing new. Offline just think about the recipe cards that are provided by supermarkets like Waitrose? They are helping you decide what to cook of course, but they are also subtly selling you the ingredients. The recipe cards, therefore, are effectively “bait”
By its very nature it must be high quality but Content Marketing can take different forms like
- Articles in the form of pdf documents
- Blog Posts
- Case Studies
- White Papers
- E-books
- Infographics
- Newsletters
- Podcasts
- Quizzes
- Videos
- Webinars
Here are the 5 golden rules about making this actually work for your business:
- What’s the plan? What are you going to produce and how often and leading to what?
- What would your customers like to know (rather than what you’d like to tell them)
- What’s the call to action – or interaction? It might be to share with others (thus spreading the word) sign up for your blog, follow you on Twitter, take advantage of an offer or request an exploratory meeting.
- Mix it up a little (see list above) – don’t only use one form of content.
- If you can’t produce something which is relevant, interesting and high quality – get someone to help you.
Before you put your head in your hands have a think, you may already have existing resources that could be re-purposed for this form of digital marketing. If not check out how I can help you
P.S
Digital Marketing methods are constantly expanding and Presentation Geeks have written a most helpful blog post about this here.
Whilst they obviously hope you will use their service, they have nevertheless been very clear about the what is out there to up your game at a time when Digital Marketing has never been so important.