What is Content Marketing?
Content
Marketing is a practice of generating, publishing and distributing contents to
the targeted audience online. The goal of content marketing is to build
reputation and visibility of a product or brand. The content marketing is often
used by the companies for following purposes:
§ Attract attention of
customers and generate leads
§ Expand their customer base
§ Generate or increase online
sales
§ Increase brand awareness or
credibility
§ Engage an online community of
users
Content Marketing Strategy
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| Content Marketing builds reputation and visibility of products or brands. (Photo by PublicDomainPictures) |
Content marketing strategy depends on anticipating and
meeting the needs of present customers for information, as opposed to
generating demand for a new need. As James writer of contently wrote on
Mashable, "The plan central to content promoting is that a whole should
provide one thing valuable to urge one thing valuable reciprocally. Rather than
the business, be the show. Rather than the banner ad, be the feature story."
When the businesses adopt content marketing, the focus should
be the needs of customers or prospects. Once a business has identified the
customer's need, information can be presented in a variety of designs, such as
news, video, photos, blogs, email newsletters, white papers, e-books, case
studies, infographics, how-to guides, question and answer articles etc.
Content Strategy
Obviously,
content is an effective marketing tool, but it doesn’t create itself. The
content may consist of stories, audios, videos, blog posts, photos, Twitter
tweets, analysis, appraisals, white papers, and eBooks. If you have not created
contents earlier, then it’s the time to go back to the drawing board and start
contents creation, create again and again when it comes perfect. Content
creation is work-intensive and time-consuming, but not cost-expensive. Just you
have the creative ability on your own.
It’s
no phenomenon that content creators need some help and they have it, in the
form of users. They don’t call it user-generated content for nothing. In 2008,
above 82 million people in the United States created online contents. This
number was increased up to 115 million in 2013. Today, most content creators
are using social networks like Facebook for posting photos or links, some users
review products or services on commercial and business sites, such as
Amazon.com, Netflix, Yelp or Zagat.com etc. There’s also a rapidly increasing
population joining much deeper activities such as blogging, curating, creating
content on sites, for example, Digg and Stumble Upon, or uploading their own
videos.
Conclusion
A beautiful aspect of content marketing is the fact that it’s
an extremely creative, right-brained activity. Content marketers are the
editors, storytellers, image presenters, and video producers. However, all that
creativity must be overseen by discipline, measurement, and a high degree of
accuracy. Now the question is, how to measure the accuracy a content to get it
an effective and persuasive marketing tool? A proper audit of these contents to
be conducted by content creators to make it a persuasive and attractive content.
Content Distribution Network | What is a CDN?
“If consumers don’t see, hear, watch, and listen to it, it won’t make a sound.”
Creating
great, persuasive, educational, entertaining, informative, and compelling
content is important, but it isn’t enough. It is critically important to get
content “out there,” to online and other digital content distribution networks
(CDN). You can make content distribution and dissemination strategies that will
capture your target audience effectively and with more visibility.
You
can publish your content on the websites, blogs, and on social media networks
effectively, but it shouldn’t stop at any stage. A strong distribution or
dissemination strategy creates opportunities to greatly amplify the impact and the reach of the content. It’s the tree
falling in the woods theory, as applied to content marketing. If consumers
don’t see, hear, watch, and listen to it, it won’t make a sound.
Moreover, distributing, and publicizing the contents on additional
podiums, such as social media networks, websites, and other digital media
channels, irrespective of what they are, automatically carries the SEO
benefits. Not only will content be more find-able to its intended audience when
it appears on more platforms, it will be more findable by search engines. Links
will be created to and from your website or relevant web presence that can help
boost visibility for the piece of content in question and possibly for a site
or blog in general.
Finally, maximizing
the channels where content appears increases its chances for viral pass-along.
But it also increases the chances that members of a social or business network,
an email list, or subscribers to a newsletter or RSS feed are exposed to the
content. Better yet, making content available to multiple channels increases
the chances that people seeing the content will virally distribute it to their
own lists of contacts, followers, or networks.
What follows are
some best-practice strategies for getting content “out there.”
Contribute
Certainly, your own
website, blog, Facebook page, and other content channels are taking up plenty
of your time, as well they should. But that’s no excuse for underestimating the
value of contributing content to properties you don’t own or control to
increase visibility and gain new audiences you may not otherwise have attracted.
Publications. A key component of contributed content is published bylined
articles, editorials, or columns in relevant editorial publications (online or
off). These can be industry, trade print or broadcast publications in your area
of expertise. They also can be business journals, local news publications, or
anything that’s relevant to your business or goals. One of the strongest
reasons to pursue this path is that editorial media outlets have editorial
controls. The information they publish automatically conveys a higher level of
authority and quality given there are hurdles to overcome in the editorial
process.
Blogs. The same path can be taken with relevant blogs (many of which have
higher levels of readership than more “traditional” publications). Again, guest
blogging on relevant sites creates more awareness and can build new audience
segments. Guest blogging also creates valuable links back to your own site or
content. Don’t forget to reciprocate by inviting guest bloggers to contribute
to your own blog, as well.
Finally, keep track
of content you publish on external sites. Blogs and online newspapers and
magazines almost always have comment sections. As an author, you have a
responsibility to monitor the discussions around your contribution and to
contribute to the discussion around the issues you raised.
Syndicate via RSS
Feeds
It’s likely that content is being published on a regular basis in
several sections of your website or sites. Blogs, press releases, new product
announcements, podcasts, and a YouTube channel are just a few examples of areas
that are frequently or regularly updated. RSS (which stands for either rich
site summary or really simple syndication, take your pick) allows newsreaders
and aggregators to scrape headlines, summaries, and links to websites for
syndication.
RSS has long been used to syndicate news content and financial
information such as stock quotes. More recently, it’s become standard operating
procedure for blogs. Organizations are turning to RSS to issue events listings,
project updates, and corporate announcements. There are RSS feeds that can
track eBay listings, products on Amazon, packages sent via major courier
services, project management activities, forum or list serve posts, recently
added downloads, search results, a book’s revision history, you name it. If
it’s online, and particularly if it’s frequently updated, it’s almost certainly
RSS-able. RSS is an invaluable tool for getting content out there, rather than
simply building it and hoping they will come.
Make sure you push content
or links to social networks, forums, and discussion sites. However, don’t
forget the old standards for content pushing, like good, old-fashioned email,
which still works perfectly well both for announcements and newsletters with
links back to online content.
There are also
numerous ways to re-purpose content from one channel into another. For example,
a webinar can be recorded as a video and published on your own website or
YouTube. Going further still, tools such as Tube mogul can push that same video
to some 30 video sharing sites.
