What is Content Marketing and why is it Important for your Business?

What is Content Marketing?

Let’s start with the what part of the title of this post… because it’s hard to perform a task effectively if you don’t know what it entails.

Content marketing is a strategic marketing process aimed at creating and distributing content which is relevant to a company’s offerings, helpful to your audience (potential customers), and designed to drive conversions.

But there are a number of building blocks to that process, which need to be addressed before you begin generating any content. Those basically boil down to your content strategy:

• Your Offering – what product(s) or service(s) do you offer? You undoubtedly already know the answer to that question, whether it’s a single product or thousands.
  
  
• Your Audience – who are you sharing your content with? This is where you need to identify the demographic makeup of your audience. Age, gender, educational background, interests, income level, and other aspects that will help you focus your content on those who are most likely to be receptive to your offering.
  
  
• Your Goal – what do you hope to accomplish with your content? Are you selling a product or service? Are you simply building your brand? Are you trying to convince them to share your content with others? Here again, there can be many different goals – often, more than one. Setting the goal for each piece of content will be essential to your success.
  
  
• Your Channel/Method – you may end up sharing your content in numerous channels and formats: blog posts, articles, social media posts, video, podcasts. Some adjustments may be necessary for different channels.

Don’t gloss over the above steps – they’re critical elements and will influence your content preparation greatly.

Consult your Content Strategy

Using your content strategy as a guide, you can now start constructing your content. And that will lead us to the second question in the title of this post: why is it important to your business?

Hopefully, it’s obvious by now why all this is important. Your content, whatever form it takes, in whichever channel you place it, needs to gently lead the audience toward your goal. Conveying information that is relevant and useful can either build your brand’s credibility or lead the audience through your conversion funnel, regardless of the ultimate goal.

Just building content without a strategic plan is just throwing things at a wall to see if anything sticks. People have very little patience with content that rambles or doesn’t provide what they expected. It’s also worth mentioning that search engines have become increasingly capable of discerning when content offers no more value than other sources. In fact, evidence suggests that Google is even declining to index content that seems to offer no real value. So avoid rehashing information already provided by others – simply rewording won’t cut it.

Tracking Results

You’ll inevitably find that some content will underperform, even though you expected it to be very effective. The only way to be aware of this, of course, is to track your audience. You need to see if they even stayed on the page long enough to absorb it; did they click through on any of your CTAs; did they bounce entirely? Monitor, learn, adjust… and not just once – constantly.