Content Marketing: The Basics

How many times have you heard the phrase, “content is king”? In today’s world, content is more than just king — it’s everything. Everything we consume on our phones and computers is content. We eat up content like it’s the last, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie on the face of the planet.

With the amount of change we’ve experienced in the digital world, it’s no surprise that marketing has moved toward content marketing as a key strategy in marketing products and services today.

What is Content Marketing?

“Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. As a business, this tactic can help you improve brand awareness, boost sales, connect with your target audience members, and engage prospects and customers.” (Hubspot)

In reality, content marketing is nothing new — in fact, brands have been doing it for years. With the rise of the internet, social media, and shorter attention spans, brands needed to find something that would not just capture, but keep, the attention of their audience. This means that the content your producing must be valuable, relevant and consistent.

How effective is content marketing?

Once you write 52 or more blog posts, blog traffic generation increases by up to 77%. (Traffic Generation Cafe)

Here’s what’s great about content marketing. It’s so much more than blogging. Content Marketing can really be expanded to using content to grow your following, build brand awareness, market your products or services, and so much more.

While blogging is among the most popular content marketing tactics, there is so much more to content marketing than just having a blog.

As you may have read with the above stat, blogs can be some of the best tools for lead generation, SEO, and inbound marketing because it not only establishes your brand as a thought leader in your industry; but it also increases the number of pages on your site to be indexed by search engines and increases the number of keywords on your site. This is HUGE for your brand in the digital world!

But, content marketing is so much more than just blogging. Using your blog, social media accounts, direct mail, email, and other efforts to distribute quality content cross-channel will make your content marketing that much more effective.

While blogs are the backbone of your content marketing strategy, there are other ways to utilize content marketing in your business. Here are a few content marketing tactics that aren’t blogs:

1. Email

2. Social media

3. Videos

4. Webinars

5. Infographics