“Content isn’t king. It’s the kingdom.” – Lee Odden
If you are looking for the definition of content marketing, there are a plethora of online resources from Hubspot to Mailchimp that will provide you with that. Here, we will be discussing a lot of creative stuff (that tends to confuse people) but in a fun way.
So, what is content marketing and why should you care?
What Is Content Marketing?
Simply put, content marketing is a long-term strategy that involves using stories to drive a narrative that will eventually lead people to purchase a product/service or perform a specified action. And we are not just talking about using websites and social media for this. A recent example of content marketing was the gargantuan publicity machine that drove the Barbie Movie release in 2023 which I am sure you did not miss. The Barbie marketing team capitalised on the stories of other brands through strategic brand partnerships and collaborations to promote the movie.
And it worked wonders!
The marketing campaign grew into a movement and thousands of brands created Barbie-themed content during that period in order to be a part of it all.
In all, content marketing is a content-driven strategy that can be used to provide relevant and useful content that will help your audience solve issues in their work (B2B content) or personal lives (B2C content) instead of direct marketing strategies like pitching products or services.
What Are Examples Of Content Marketing?
Some easy examples of content marketing are blogs, branded YouTube channels, eBooks, Podcasts, and email newsletters. My website and my blog are good examples of content marketing. I use my website and the different pages on there to boost awareness of my interests, opinions on relevant industry topics, my content marketing agency and even my free resources.
Comparing Copywriting and Content Marketing
As I’ve highlighted previously, content marketing is different from copywriting. While copywriting’s primary purpose is to drive conversions, content marketing’s primary purpose is to build an audience. Personally, I believe that an effective marketing strategy should not prioritise copywriting over content marketing, or vice versa. You can effectively use both to create content that educates, nurtures and sells to your audience.
Why Content Marketing Is Important
Now, to another fun thing, the importance of content marketing.
In today’s information-driven world, it is impossible to execute great marketing strategies without great content. Content marketing is a complete customer acquisition strategy that drives traffic, builds trust, establishes your authority, and generates revenue for you and/or your business.
Of course, the host of other marketing strategies, from social media marketing to pay-per-click (PPC) ads help you achieve the same results as content marketing, but none can individually achieve all the results, and as organically as content marketing.
It is the best strategy to use when you don’t want to come across as salesy, you want to attract and capture prospects (who are not even thinking of making a purchase) at the very top of the sales funnel, and build an intimate relationship with your audience that you can later capitalise on to sell a host of different things. Is this not a good reason to capitalise on content marketing?
Why You Need Content Marketing
If the above did not convince you that you need to invest in content marketing, well, sit back and read on.
Content is integrated into everything you do, both as a business and an individual. When you tell a story about your past, your children, your business, even when you post a random picture on Instagram on a random Saturday evening, that is content marketing as you are trying to push a narrative on whatever that story or photo is about. Your marketing process is not different from all of that.
Telling quality stories to your loved ones endears them to you, same way quality content can impact on the success of all forms of marketing, like:
- Social media marketing: The content that will support your content strategy comes before your social media strategy.
- Digital marketing: The foundation for a successfully integrated digital marketing strategy is great content.
- Email marketing: An email list that consistently receives great content can be subconsciously trained to anticipate, open and read emails from your brand.
- PPC: The success of a PPC campaign is hinged on the great content that drives it.
- Content strategy: Great content is actually what drives a successful content strategy.
- Inbound marketing: People read content and great content is critical for driving inbound traffic and leads.
- SEO: The different search engines reward businesses that consistently publish quality content.
- PR: Successful PR strategies should address issues readers care about, not their business.
The Formula For A Successful Content Marketing Campaign
A successful content marketing strategy is one that has a clear goal and a focused target audience.
Content marketing takes different forms, from videos and pictures to infographics and podcasts. And at the bottom of it all, the winning formula for producing great content and getting people to buy from you is:
- Highlighting your audience’s pain point,
- Evaluating that pain, and
- Solving the problem that’s at the root of that pain.
Look at your favourite authors, podcasters, social media influencers, and the like, they achieved success when they found some problems and created solutions to them whether using:
- Educational,
- Informational,
- Inspirational,
- Conversational,
- Connection,
- Promotion, and
- Entertainment.
Content Marketing Tools To Make Your Job Easier
Content marketing is an enormous job. And whether you are an expert or beginner content marketer, content marketing tools help to make that job significantly easier. They also enable better collaboration, tracking, analysis, and communication, all of which come together to guarantee success of content marketing strategies. That said, here are some of my favourite content marketing tools:
- Hootsuite:
This software is actually a collection of tools that can help you at whatever stage of the content creation and management process that you are at.
- Canva:
I love free tools and Canva is one of the best freemium tools for creating beautiful graphics. From social media posts to email newsletters and videos to full websites, Canva has an abundance of templates in their premium collection as well as thousands that are free to use.
- Google Workspace:
Google Workspace contains Google’s suite of tools that are particularly useful for distributed teams, as the cloud-based tools ensure team members can collaborate effectively online.
- WordPress:
WordPress is one of the best content marketing tools that I have invested in for years, and it is especially useful for small businesses. It’s a content management system (CMS) that makes it easy to create, update, and manage content for your blog or website, even with no design skills.
- Ahrefs:
Ahrefs is a content marketing tool that helps you build content addressing topics that your target audience are already looking for online. The keywords explorer tool helps you find new keyword ideas, then analyses each option to determine how hard it will be to rank for that term. You can also use the tool to track and analyse existing keyword sets.
- SEMRush:
SEMRush is one of my best keyword and SEO tools that helps you ensure that your content marketing assets connect with your audience. It helps you find popular topics and questions to address in your content marketing. It also has an SEO content template to help you rank and an SEO writing assistant to check your SEO score and improve readability.
How To Get Started With Content Marketing
If you want to start investing in content marketing, then you must follow the formula above and detect the problem that you are passionate about helping people to resolve.
Your content must cater to the right audience and provide them with the right solution (your product or service) that solves the right problem. If your content doesn’t do this, then it’s likely that you’ll be wasting all your content marketing efforts.
So if you are ready to invest in content marketing, then start by writing down what results/goals you want to achieve like raising brand awareness, acquiring email addresses, or increasing conversion rates.
Then, define your target audience as detailed and in depth as you can. Here’s an example, my content marketing strategies are targeted at single mothers who have businesses that operate predominantly online and who want to learn more about increasing traffic to their websites and generating more online revenue.
Now that all of that is done, you can move to the last stage which is to write a clear plan about how you will achieve your goal(s).
Another example, if your goal is to increase your email subscribers, your content plan should include creating an eBook, writing the copy for the eBook’s landing page, and then creating a series of blog posts and email sequences that will drive traffic to that landing page you created. Make your plan as detailed as possible and include a content creation plan for gathering ideas, creating the first draft of your content, editing and finalising the content, then posting. This way, you can stay on top of all relevant tasks while you operate as a one-man team. With future success, you can expand your team, and in turn your content plan to reflect who will create each piece of content, when it will be written, who will review and approve each content, and where it will be posted.
The Content Marketing Purchasing Funnel
Just as there are stages in a sales funnel, there are stages in a content marketing funnel. You must tailor your different pieces of content in line with the stage in your content where your audience are at. Although I won’t go into detail about the different stages of content marketing in this post, here is a list of the stages of the content marketing purchasing funnel for you to keep in mind:
- Awareness: This is when you build awareness of your brand.
- Consideration: This when you start to build some connection and trust with your audience.
- Decision: This is when your audience begins to take that extra step and purchase from you.
- Loyalty: This is when you have built a trusted relationship with your audience that they trust your opinions and will purchase anything you sell to them.
Content Marketing Tips
Of course, just like every other marketing strategy, there are some tips to guarantee your success in content marketing. Here are some great ones that I love to use:
- Track every effort:
You will be investing some time and effort into creating and publishing great content. Why not take a few minutes daily/weekly/monthly to review the analytics? This will help you to know what types of content perform best and which don’t.
This will help you to tweak your strategies and content in order to dedicate more time into creating and publishing better content that will perform well and help you achieve your pre-determined goals.
For your website, use Google Analytics to track your analytics. For social media, use the native analytics of the analytics of whatever application you use in publishing your social media content.
- Run tests:
The benefit of A/B testing in marketing can’t be underestimated. When you figure out the type of content that performs best, start testing. Test different headlines, different content layouts, different calls-to-action(CTA). Just test everything. This will help you to adjust your content and strategies as necessary and increase the conversion rate of your content.
- Create a content schedule:
My years in the media and publishing industry taught me the importance of creating an editorial calendar. It not only helps you to eliminate the stress of content creation, it also helps to boost productivity. Luckily, there are different softwares in the market to help you ace this, such as:
- Notion (my favourite),
- Trello,
- Asana,
- Monday.com, and
- ProofHub.
- Segment your audience:
Not every member of your audience will make a purchase. Your content might not suit everyone because they may all be at different phases of the customer journey. This makes it necessary for you to segment your audiences based on their needs. Email segmentation is easy to implement, but for your website and social media, you should aim to create content that will connect with different members of your audience at the different stages of the customer journey.
There are many more content marketing tips available on the internet. Take some time to invest in learning as much as you can (or hiring a content marketing expert like me) so that you can create and execute compelling content marketing strategies that will propel you closer to your goals.
Hopefully, this article is insightful and gives you an idea of what content marketing is, what goes into creating a winning content marketing strategy and what it takes to be a good content marketer.
