What is content marketing?

Whether you’re a B2C or B2B company, content marketing should be a staple in just about any business’ marketing activities.

Before we explain what content marketing is, let’s look at the benefits of content marketing and why you should be incorporating it as part of your marketing activities.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

When done well, content marketing can deliver a range of benefits for your business. Some of these include:

1. Increased awareness for your business. Consistently publishing content that’s highly engaging will help ensure your brand stays top-of-mind with your audience when they’re ready to buy.

2. Greater trust with your audience. Content marketing helps build the ‘know, like, trust’ factor with your business. First, content marketing allows your audience to get to ‘know’ your business. If your content resonates with them, your audience will start to ‘like’ your business. Finally, with consistent content marketing, your audience will begin to ‘trust’ your business.

3. More traffic to your website. Part of content marketing is publishing high-value blogs on your website. These will help increase your SEO rankings on Google, thereby driving more traffic to your page.

4. Greater engagement on social media. As part of your content marketing activities, you should be creating content that solves your customer problems. Do this and you will see higher engagement and build a bigger following on your social channels.

5. Better conversion rates. When you run promotions or sales campaigns, you’ve already built an army of followers who ‘know, like and trust’ your business. They’re familiar with your business and are more likely to buy from you.

Now that we have an overview of the benefits of content marketing and why you’d want to incorporate it into your marketing activities, let’s talk about what content marketing is, the different types of content marketing and how to win at content marketing.

What is content marketing?

At its simplest form, content marketing is using your digital channels (i.e. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, your business website, email marketing etc) to serve high-value content to your target audience.

The aim of content marketing is to reach, engage and connect with your target audience to nurture these relationships so your business is top of mind when they’re ready to buy.

Unlike traditional marketing, which focuses on selling products and services, content marketing puts the customer first by serving them content that they find relevant and useful.

A great example of content marketing is a high-value blog.

For example, a residential home builder may create a blog for their website about ‘10 top home design trends for 2021’.

This would help anyone thinking of building a new home by giving them inspiration and ideas when designing their own home.

The key is you’re giving your audience valuable information rather than a sales pitch about your product or service.

Types of content marketing

Content marketing can come in many forms.

You can create long-from content, such as a regular blog, podcast, or video series (i.e. on YouTube).

You can also create short-form content, such as social media posts (i.e. on Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn), an email newsletter, or website content (i.e. checklists, templates or FAQs), among others.

The most efficient way to execute content marketing is to choose just one type of long-form content and then repurpose this to create more snackable bits of short-from content across your digital channels.

For example, you could regularly publish a blog on your website (long-form content), and then repurpose this to create multiple Instagram stories, LinkedIn posts and items for your email newsletter (short-form content).

Take the previous example of the home builder who created a blog (long-form content) about the ‘10 top home design trends for 2021’.

We could repurpose this one single blog to create the following short-form content.

1. An Instagram story of the most cost-effective trends from the list.

2. 10 individual Instagram posts profiling each of the trends.

3. Feature the blog in your business email newsletter, highlighting the most ‘out there’ trends.

4. A LinkedIn post of the builder’s favourite 3 trends.

5. Website FAQs about the trends

These are just some ideas of short-form pieces of content that could be produced using that one single blog.

Content marketing ideas and topics

Creating topics for your long-form pieces of content is easier than you think.

The key is to create content around your customer’s most frequently asked questions, their pain points and their problems.

This is often referred to as ‘needs-based content’ because it’s addressing a need of your target audience.

Using the example of the home builder again, some common customer questions or problems might be:

1. How long does the building process take?

2. What’s included in the price of my building contract (and more importantly, what’s not!)

3. Should I use an architect or a drafter to design my home?

4. What are the pros and cons of a house-and-land package?

5. How do I get the most bang for my buck when building?

These are just a few ideas to create long-form pieces of content, which can then be repurposed to create your short-from content for your other digital channels.

It’s important to complement your needs-based content with other types of content, such as:

1. Customer case studies and testimonials

2. Brand-focused content (i.e. storytelling your ‘why’ - why you started your business)

3. Product or service-related information. Yes, you can talk about your products and services but focus on features and benefits and publish this content sparingly.

4. Other educational content such as eBooks.

How to win at content marketing

The overwhelming key to content marketing is to be consistent.

Whatever long-form piece of content you choose to create (i.e. blog, podcast, video series) make sure you’re publishing it regularly and consistently, be it weekly, fortnightly or monthly.

Consistency is also key when it comes to your short-form content.

Using your long-form piece of content, create a content calendar to map out all your short-form content for the month ahead and stick to it.

Most content marketers will batch content at the start of each month. For example, they’ll create a blog, and then produce a dozen (or more) short-form pieces of content.

You can use a scheduling tool (like Loomly or Hootsuite) to automatically publish all your content for the month so you don’t have to do it every day.

Conclusion

It’s hard to ignore content marketing given the amazing benefits that it can deliver for your business.

And the best part about content marketing is that it doesn’t take a huge marketing budget.

Even if you want to outsource it, content marketing can be much more cost efficient than you think.