What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media. This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.

Why use content marketing?

For one thing, marketing today is impossible without great content.

Content should be integrated into your marketing process, not treated as something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing, including:

  • Email marketing: Consistently great content trains your audience to anticipate, open and read emails from your brand.
  • Social media marketing: Content strategy comes before your social media strategy.
  • SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
  • PR: Successful PR strategies should address issues readers care about, not their business.
  • PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
  • Inbound marketing: Content is critical to driving inbound traffic and leads.
  • Digital marketing: Content forms the foundation for an improved or rebooted integrated digital marketing strategy.
  • Content strategy: Content strategy (which determines how content is created and managed throughout an organization) must be considered.

How content marketing works:

Your business can use content marketing to attract leads, make a case for your product or service when someone is researching what to buy, and close sales.

To use it effectively, you’ll need to deliver the right content at each stage of the sales cycle—from awareness through consideration to purchase. If this sounds complicated, don’t worry: Approaching content this way actually simplifies the process.

Here’s how companies use content marketing in each stage of the sales cycle to engage and sell.

How to get started with content marketing:

Content marketing can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. A successful content marketing campaign should be manageable and sustainable. Take these steps to get started:

Identify your audience:

To create content for a particular reader, you need to have a clear idea of their priorities, challenges, and preferences. If you have detailed descriptions of your various segments, choose 1 or 2 to write for. Otherwise, craft profiles of your audience members and prospects before starting.

Determine the right formats:

The right format corresponds with what stage of the sales cycle you’re creating content for. Another important consideration includes what formats will best help you showcase value. For some, this will be a video; for others, a checklist.

An audience will judge your content on its quality, and they should. Identify the right resource, internal or external, to create this work. Regardless of who creates it, hire a professional proofreader to review anything before it goes out the door.

Determine how you’ll distribute:

Will you post content on your site, email it to people, or print it for an event? Start with “where” you know your audience is likely to be, and choose formats that make sense. For example, an article makes sense to send via an email, a checklist or worksheet can be posted on social media, and a buyer’s guide is a good follow-up to a pitch.

Choose a sustainable schedule

Once you know who your target readers are and the best formats for every stage in the sales cycle, create a short-term (3-6 months) plan. It’s easy to develop a content marketing plan that’s overly ambitious. However, the plan you design should have content elements you can realistically make based on your budget and resources. Keep track of how long it takes you to create each piece of content so that you can build that time into your schedule.

Follow best practice:

Content marketing makes it easy for good prospects to find your business. However, you can boost your efforts with search engine optimization (SEO).

Here are a few important best practices:

Keywords are the foundation of your SEO effort. These all-important words and phrases are the terms a prospect types into a search engine when they’re looking for a company, product, or service.

When you include the right keywords in your content, you’ll attract more traffic. The best keywords are:

  • Plain-language: language your audience uses to describe their pain points and needs
  • Relevant: keywords that match the expertise, products, and services you provide
  • Specific: a combination of your focus, industry expertise, prospect pain points, and other relevant details

SEO has evolved so that search success depends in part on how well your content does what it says it’ll do. Search engines review content copy, assess its relevance, and determine whether it delivers on what the headline promises.