What is content marketing?
Content Marketing is one of the most popular and simplest forms of marketing that your business can undertake. It is the act of creating content purely for marketing purposes that you then publish via various media. Although this content is created for marketing purposes it is structured in an informative and educational format as opposed to hard sell marketing – you focus on an idea or situation rather than a product and gently introduce what your business can do to improve the situation explained.
Content marketing is often called a number of different things: conversation marketing, corporate journalism, branded content, custom media, customer media and so on. Content marketing can be published in many different forms, the most popular of which is via a blog (just like this one) on a businesses website. Other forms of content marketing can include audio, video, paper based content such as magazine articles, newspaper articles and the like, television ads or shows, pod casts, radio ads and just about every other form of PR and marketing allows for content marketing.
Why is content marketing an important marketing activity for my business?
Content Marketing is one of the most successful forms of marketing because it achieves a number of initiatives across various channels all at once. As a basic overview content marketing allows your business to:
- Increase information about your business, services and products in a friendly way without overloading your potential customers with details that will bog them down
- Provide information about your businesses applicability to various niches – this means that you can use your blog to talk about how great your accommodation business is for weddings, elderly couples, family holidays, group get-togethers, international visitors, weekends away and extended trips all while making each different group of people feel as though your business is catered just for them
- Use the information you have created on your different niches to extend your rankings and visibility on Google and other search engines – each different blog post will get listed as a new page and as each post is also specific to your niche it will be search engine optimised well and will contain all of your strong keywords
- Position your business as the experts in your field – this allows you to create a relationship with your readers and be positioned as the go to people for help on your topic (meaning you get return readers and customers while strengthening your reputation and increasing your chances of a strong word of mouth)
- Publish content that can be shared across social media platforms to keep your contacts engaged and interested in what you have to say
- Increase your customers! its as simple as that.
What is a content marketing strategy?
Just like all activities in your business and marketing efforts, content marketing needs a strategy and structure. A content marketing strategy will become your go to point of reference when deciding the who, what, when, where, why and how of your content marketing plans:
WHO – Who will be creating the content, who is your target market and who will people contact if they are interested in what you have to say
WHAT – What topics will you be speaking about, what is your overall aim (increase first time purchases v increasing return customers, increase 3 night stays v increase weekly family holidays etc)
WHEN – When will you be publishing content (specific events, seasonal content, high season v low season), when will you be creating content (you don’t have to do it all at once and you don’t have to write it the day you want to publish it)
WHERE – Where will you be publishing your content – on your blog, social media, via an email newsletter, will you print paper copies
WHY – Why are you writing about each topic, why is your target market going to read your content
HOW – How are you going to share your content with others, how are you going to position yourself in the market, how are you going to plan for the long term and how are you going to publish content (does your website have the technical capabilities – CMS, blog etc)
Content Marketing Strategy Tips from the Experts
When creating the content marketing strategy for your business take some tips from the experts:
Rebecca Lieb at E-Consultancy has created a fantastic list of 11 steps for a successful content marketing strategy including creating an editorial calendar, using multimedia formats, using guest contributors to even up the workload and utilising the comments and feedback functionality of your blog, check out the full article: 11 steps toward a content strategy
Sonny Lanorias from SonnyLanorias.com has provided more information on 5 of the key steps we have mentioned above to create an effective content marketing strategy: utilising social media traffic, posting content on your blog, setting up a blog to capture traffic, developing a relationship and last but not lease selling. Sonny covers further information on how you can do each of these in his article: Proven Content Marketing Blueprint
As always the team at Mashable have done a fantastic job of collating some actionable tips from experts that they frequently read and subscribe to, their list of 5 content marketing strategies for small businesses should not be taken lightly.
