“What is content Marketing?” is one of the most famous questions these days.
To answer that question, I’ve created a step by step guide in which I will cover each and every topic about content Marketing Like a season. So, grab a cup of tea and start reading 🙂
What is Content Marketing?
According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI), Content Marketing is a long-term marketing approach in which we focus on the creation and distribution of most relevant, valuable and consistent content with the specified audience.
In addition to that, I’ve explored some more definitions from the web so that you can get clear idea about what is content marketing?
Marketo states that content marketing is a systematic process in which high quality and valuable content is created for well defined audience. In this marketing technique, businesses usually advertise their products and services with targeted audience.
Bob Ruffalo from IMPACTBND says that content marketing is all about the information. He further explains that it is a business marketing technique in which businesses or brands regularly share helpful, educational and insightful information with the specific audience so that they can solve their problems and improve their lives.
Neil Patel (a famous digital marketing expert) greatly explained what is content marketing? He says that content marketing is a broad niche. It is not just about blog posts, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube viral posts and videos. He further explains that content marketing is all about story telling. In my point of view, he thought differently and presented another aspect of content marketing 🙂
CopyBlogger is one of the best and helpful blogs for bloggers. While researching content marketing, I stumbled upon their page and found another awesome definition which is “Content Marketing means creating and distributing valuable free contents to attract, engage and convert prospects into buyers and buyers into repeat or regular buyers”.
Content Marketing Terms
After reading all these definitions, you can see that there are some specific content marketing terms which have been consistently used in the definitions such as
- Strategic approach
- Valuable content
Let’s elaborate each term in detail:
1. Strategic Approach
Strategic approach means long term approach. It means that content marketing is used for long term period instead of short term period.
So, it is a systemic and continues process which businesses have to integrate it in their marketing campaigns.
2. Valuable Content
In all the above mentioned definitions, you will definitely notice a term “valuable content”. Josh Steimle (a Forbes contributor) also highlighted the term valuable content in his article. He says that if we remove “valuable” in the content marketing definition, then the remaining stuff will act like traditional advertising and marketing material which is usually avoided by people.
In content marketing campaigns, creation of high quality valuable content is very important. The main reason of valuable content is to attract and convert prospects into happy customers.
According to Marketo Guide, today customers are expert. An average customer (around 60% to 90%) guides themselves before they reach out to brands and sale persons. Another research shows that 81% shoppers love to research online before they make big purchases. In the same report, researchers found that buyers spend 79 days (on average basis) in conducting research before buying.
The above statistics shows that buyers love to do research about the products/services before they buy. These researches are usually conducted online and they guide themselves through online free contents and guides.
Final Thoughts
Content marketing is not a new marketing approach. It has been used from centuries but in different forms. I believe that content marketing is the present as well as the future of marketing and small businesses should integrate it in their marketing strategies.
I hope you got a basic idea about what is content marketing? To help you to understand bit more about content marketing , soon I’ll share more stuff on it.
Upcoming Contents:
- 25 Content Marketing Terms You Should Know
- How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
- 5 Killer Content Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- Content Marketing Cheat Sheet
- Best Websites for Content Marketing
- X Content Marketing Benefits You Should Know
- What is the Future of Content Marketing?
- 10 Free Content Marketing Tips For B2B Organizations
