Categories: Online marketing

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is aligning content effectively with your customer’s journey as part of your marketing strategy.

Here are 5 benefits marketing of content marketing:

helps grow your audience and build a community about the products and services you are selling
improve recruit brand advocates to build your credibility and influence
increases search results in the search engines
assists with generating potential leads and convert to sales
enhances understanding of your product or service in the market

There are three types of content marketing: Content Creation and Content Curation and Effective Content.

So what is the difference between Curation and Creation and Effective content?

Curation is utilising content from a 3rd party source, which is a lower resource investment. Ideally, you should always add your own commentary to give it further context for your audience. It’s an efficient way of producing content by leveraging content created by others.

Creation is content on the other hand, has been created from scratch and requires a higher resource investment. Original content means you own it 100% as a thought leader which helps to build credibility.

Effective content, its about aligning content with customer’s buying cycle.

Let’s go into more detail about the three types of content marketing.

Content curation

To curate content, search for information from different sources relevant to your business or industry. You can create Google Alerts based on specific keywords and receive notifications daily or weekly.

Creating a mindmap or content calendar helps to plan out your content. This helps to build up resources to use for publishing relevant content. Then you can add your insight and share with your audience some valuable content. Posting content on social media is not all about selling your products and services.

With content curation, remember to:

ensure the information is verified and credible
remember to add your own thoughts or opinion on the content
dont duplicate content just for the sake of it
have a mix of sources that you are curating content from and
include relevant attribution where its due

Content creation

When creating content, you can create Topical content or Evergreen content or Effective content.

With topical content, here are some themes you can cover.

Choose a general theme covering events that are relevant to your audience.
What is the outcome you are trying to achieve with your topical content? Then work backwards to see if it fits in your theme or message you want to get across.
Resource your topical content adequately, so that it can be rolled into an action when its needed. Then you can arrange for a copy writer and designers to prepare the branding and message.

With evergreen content, its about timeless topics to focus on your customer’s needs and what they are searching for all the time.

Provide relevant and valuable content for a prolonged period
The content can be repurposed into different formats, video, social media posts, infographics, blog posts, podcasts etc.

Effective content

With effective content, its about providing content that is relevant, personalised and or educational. It demonstrates that your product or services provide the customer a solution to their problem. The content should also include an explicit call to action (CTA).

By reposting content on social media it helps to extend the reach and acquire more followers.