What is Content Marketing? An Explainer
The story of Buffer is an interesting place to start. You must have heard of them, the social media scheduling app. When Buffer started out, the founders, Leo Wildrich and Joel Gascoigne had no funding. They pitched their startup to Tech Crunch and Mashable but no one wanted to touch them.
Seeing this, the founders became writers. Buffer began as a Twitter scheduling app, as such, they wrote blog posts on tips to craft better tweets. They taught readers how to get more followers and how businesses could use Twitter for SEO. The blog posts they wrote got shared more than 1,000 times per post. Potential customers of the App quickly trusted Buffer and began to use their services. With this success, the app expanded to other social media apps. By August 2019, Buffer surpassed $20 Million in annual revenue.
What’s Content Marketing?
What Buffer had done is the classic content marketing definition. Using quality content to magnet customers to your product or services. It’s about what the audience care about and creating content to help them find answers to their questions.
According to Content Marketing Institute:
“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 — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
What this definition shows is that rather than being salesy to your customer, you should be giving them relevant and useful content.
Michele Linn noted that “Content Marketing is educational. It’s not about the products the company sells.”
Essentially, content marketing focuses on what your customers or potential customers want to learn. It should be educational and interesting to keep them long enough to trust your company’s products or services. A good content marketing strategy does not focus on what the company sells. It focuses on valuable content that answers customers’ questions.
Content marketing focuses on building a relationship with the customer and audience. With a trusted and consistent relationship built, it’s easier for the purchase decision to be made.
Although, this form of marketing isn’t a new concept, the growth of the internet and digital has made it easier for brands and companies to reach their audience even when they’re curled up in the corner of a room.
Over 1 million accounts were created on Buffer last year. Notwithstanding this growth, Buffer’s blogs published 212 blog posts.
Why Should You Consider Content Marketing?
The question you should be asking is why not?
Content marketing puts you in the hands of your customers. It gives them the resources, guides, knowledge, entertainment that helps them trust you and your products/service better. With growth of trust and loyalty comes more sales.
It can’t be wrong when 91% of B2B companies are doing it.
Maybe you don’t follow the “bandwagon?” Here are more reasons you should use content marketing today:
- Content marketing builds trust and loyalty: I didn’t say so. Buzzsumo did: “content marketing bridges the gap between your products and your target audience.” What it does is to put your customers first. Ensuring to build a meaningful relationship with them.
When a customer feels they’re being responded to, they would be willing to pay for your product.
Contents also help build value for your seller-customer relationship. Give me content and I will be willing to give you my money. It’s a win-win.
2. Your potential buyer most probably doesn’t know what they want: Imagine you want to buy the best air pod in the market but don’t want Apple’s. What do you do?
You most probably will google.
You type in some sort of search query and you’re bombarded with different pictures and names of brands in the market.
Well, you’re not alone. According to GroupM, about 86% of buyers enter non-branded search queries into search engines at the beginning of their buyer’s journey.
Another 85% ignore paid ads and focus on the organic search results.
This shows that customers are keen on reading up on products before making a purchase. Gaining knowledge on products is part of the customer experience. You don’t want to miss out on that.
3. People are tired of ads: How many times have you skipped YouTube ads? Don’t answer.
Relevance is a key factor for content marketing. While advertisement are made to saturate, content marketing aims to resonate with the buyer.
While advertisement is a music video irrelevant to you before your YouTube video, content marketing is your “How to…” YouTube videos.
Much of the money you spend on Ads might be going down the drain. Why? Ad blockers.
Advertisement is Spam folder. Content marketing is primary folder. It speaks to you and attempts to create a relationship with you. Due to the reasonableness of content marketing, a customer grows an affinity towards your brand.
4. It’s cheaper: content marketing cost less to deploy. All businesses are always looking for ways to cut cost.
Apparently, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional advertising. It also brings 3 times more leads than traditional marketing.
Using an opt-in subscription based advertisement, for example, you’re more likely to save up a lot on lead generation. By developing a good number of subscribers before purchase, you’re more likely to be the one they will buy from when they finally decide to buy.
Types of Content Marketing
Content marketing comes in different forms. The content marketing strategy a company chooses to use will determine the content marketing campaign materials that will be employed. They can be categorized into four types:
- Written word
- Audio
- Video
- Images
Here are the most commonly used types:
1. Infographics: generally includes but not limited to statistics, graphs, and charts that educate your audience. They’re effective because they can be quickly shared on different websites and social media.
2. Blog: creating a blog that speaks to your website visitors is a quick way to gain customers. HubSpot and Buffer are good examples of how written content can quickly help you scale your business.
3. Podcasts: getting noticed in a noisy world is easier when you give valuable information to people who want to listen.
4. Social Media Posts: Your business should posts on social media consistently. That’s where your customers are.
5. Videos: YouTube videos or videos posted on your website offering value to viewers will prompt new sign ups or purchase.
A recent analysis by Entrepreneur show that content marketing may soon include: Live-streaming, Augmented Reality (AR), Voice-search optimized content, and personalized content based on web activity.
Content Marketing Best Practices
Finding the content marketing strategy best for your company can be tricky. But over the years, some practices to help your content marketing strategy have proven consistently useful.
1. Add Value: the most important factor to consider when doing content marketing is to know that your content must be valuable to the intended audience. Publish blog post because you want to teach your potential customer, not because you want to sell.
2. Consistency: According to Zazzle Media, 60% of companies struggle to produce content consistently. 65% find it hard to produce engaging content. Inconsistency of contents means that your brand isn’t reliable. You don’t want customers to think that.
3. Build Relationships: Buffer, in showing how to do content marketing, invited guest bloggers to guest post on their blog. Doing this allowed the company to build relationships with people who could tell others about Buffer.
4. Personalize: Your customers are bombarded with thousands of contents each day. Personalize your content for your audience by understanding their needs.
5. SEO: optimize your content to be seen by your potential customers. Ensure your content are properly optimized for potential customers searching for answers.
How to Perform Content Marketing
Neil Patel suggests that using the “3D Content” model could help you practice good content marketing. They include:
1. Mapping to pain point
2. Mapping appropriate content
3. Mapping to buy cycle
This model helps you focus your content away from being a marketer to the customers your content is to reach. The ultimate goal of your content marketing strategy is to ensure that your contents cater to the right people with the right problem your product solves.
The Content Marketing Institute states that “your strategy should outline your key business and customer needs, and how your content efforts will address them.”
Copyblogger say that content marketing strategy is “a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.”
Hence, the pain point is what your contents must target. What are your customers problems? How does your products solve them?
Once this is answered, you determine what kind of content is appropriate to help you reach your audience. Writing blog posts, posting videos and photos, creating funny memes, sending out emails, creating online games and quizzes are some of the options to consider.
You have to determine which of the options is best for your business by weighing their effectiveness and benefits. Your goal is to get more business revenue.
To map your buy cycle, you have to understand where your customers are and how they will find your content.
You may need to research who your customer is. Your content decision should be tailored towards the results of this research.
Most people Google what they need. Ensure your content is on the first page of Google to answer their questions.
For the “3D Content” model to be successful, you must ensure that your content are:
A. Well researched;
B. Offer answers to audience questions;
C. Can be repurposed for different platforms; Your blog posts can be repurposed to picture slides to be shared on instagram, for example;
D. Are easily shareable;
E. Are optimized for better reach. Keyword research, SEO, subtitles for videos;
F. Can be analyzed. You should be able to see which content is doing well and which isn’t. This will help you decide on what kind of contents to focus on.
G. Repeat and be consistent. Good things come to those who are consistent. Ensure your customers find your content repeatedly and they will buy from you.
Conclusion
Google Trends show a constant upsurge in the interest in content marketing. To begin, you will need to know which type of content is best for your business. This will help you determine where your customers are spending their time.
Having a content marketing strategy in place should be the constant focus for your marketing team. It doesn’t matter the size of your business or company, effective content marketing can increase leads, improve brand visibility, reduce marketing cost, strengthen customers trust, and help generate sales.
