Content Marketing

12 Key excerpts on "Content Marketing"

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  eBook - PDF

  Internet Marketing

  • Debra Zahay, Mary Roberts(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Add to that, it’s a very creative market- ing effort that costs almost nothing. Watch the video in Interactive Exercise 8.1 and see what you think. WHAT EXACTLY IS Content Marketing? There seem to be as many definitions of Content Marketing as there are people who write about it—and most marketers seem to do so at one time or another. The defini- tion of the Content Marketing Institute is comprehensive: Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creat- ing and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive prof- itable customer action. 5 Their definition highlights the fact that Content Marketing is part of overall mar- keting strategy. As such, content must be created with a specific, clearly-defined target audience in mind. The content must be useful to them—must resonate in their lives—and it must motivate them to take the actions the marketer calls for. That is good; isn’t it enough? No, in order to accomplish the Content Marketing task, marketers need a content strategy. Here is a good definition that clarifies the difference: Content strategy deals with the planning aspects of managing con- tent throughout its lifecycle, and includes aligning content to business goals, analysis, and modeling, and influences the development, produc- tion, presentation, evaluation, measurement, and sunsetting of content, including governance. 6 FIGURE 8.2 A Slide from the HubSpot Culture Code SOURCE: https://inbound.org/blog/ask-dharmesh-about-the-hubspot-culture-code. Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience.

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  eBook - ePub

  The Digital Crown

  Winning at Content on the Web

  • Ahava Leibtag(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Morgan Kaufmann

    (Publisher)

  Once they regard you as a friend, you have created a member of a brand community who will advocate for you and spread positive comments about you all around the web. Content Marketing exists to pull people into your customer loop (lead funnel) by providing practical, useful information that leads to continued engagement and interest.

  Findable, shareable, trustworthy—they are the hallmarks of great Content Marketing. Let’s explore more.

  What Is Content Marketing?

  We defined Content Marketing earlier, back in Chapter 1 . So, let’s revisit the concept.

  Joe Pulizzi explains, “Content Marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action” (Pulizzi, 2012a ).

  Debbie Williams, from Sprout Content, explains it from the perspective of the customer, “Content Marketing is about timeliness, connection, response, and results. It allows businesses to connect with and grow their audience by providing compelling, helpful, and purposeful information that their audience is looking for. Content creation and marketing offers a more personal approach to business, and helps build trust, which ultimately creates longer and more meaningful consumer/brand relationships. Brands can also promote their expertise in an industry and become a valuable resource to people that consumers look to for guidance, advice, and trusted information on a topic. Unlike traditional advertising that is largely one-sided and disruptive, Content Marketing creates conversation and empowers both sides with a voice” (Williams, 2010 ).

  Content Marketing Goals

  By combining both Joe and Debbie’s definitions, we see that Content Marketing has very specific goals when it comes to developing a rapport with a clearly defined target audience (which is why you must create personas, as we talked about in Chapter 6

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  eBook - ePub

  Introduction to Digital Marketing 101

  Easy to Learn and implement hands on guide for Digital Marketing

  • Cecilia Figueroa(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • BPB Publications

    (Publisher)

  Further, the reader will be able to promote, distribute, and design the content for marketing effectiveness. The reader can also measure the impact of Content Marketing, learn the role of content strategy and Content Marketing, and organize content. What is content? In simple words, content is a message that often includes a variation of a value proposition in a variety of formats. Content can be anything from a blog post, to a thank-you page, or an ad, and is aimed at building trust and connection between you and your audience. Elements of content Creating your content is one thing, but you need to make sure your message allows a high level of penetration in the audience, in a disinterested way, something that they perceive as valuable. All these elements will help the company ensure that it puts forth content that has the elements necessary to resonate and inspire action: Marketing technique: Content Marketing is a marketing technique whose ultimate goal is to generate brand and increase brand results. Distribution: It is linked to the creation of original content. You must use all the resources available to the brand to ensure that the highest possible percentage of our audience receives the highest quality content, and for this, planned and effective distribution is also crucial. Valuable content: The content that you distribute should be perceived as valuable. The public currently wants to consume as well as generate content according to their tastes and emotions. However, the competition is scathing; there is always someone with more resources than our company

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  eBook - ePub

  The Digital Marketing Handbook

  Deliver Powerful Digital Campaigns

  • Simon Kingsnorth(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  07

  Creating content that excites, informs and converts

  The Content Marketing Institute (CMI, 2021, 1) defines Content Marketing as ‘a strategic marketing technique to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience through the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the objective of driving profitable customer action.’

  Even though Content Marketing and content might seem identical and the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, they are not quite the same thing, although they overlap to some extent. Put simply, the difference between Content Marketing and content is the aim of the former – to drive users through the funnel and become customers. Content does not have an explicit aim. Content Marketing exists to attract an audience, accumulate a following and drive sales.

  Why invest in Content Marketing?

  According to expert Neil Patel, Content Marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on developing a strong relationship with your target audience by consistently providing them with useful, relevant, quality content. Unlike one-time advertising, Content Marketing demonstrates that you genuinely care about your clients. It’s particularly useful for B2B or in-depth subjects where it’s necessary to show expertise to win a customer.

  Benefits of Content Marketing include:

  • Increasing brand awareness and loyalty. Engaging content can help a newly established brand develop trust. You may simply begin to create trust within your online space if your audience finds the information you’re sharing or creating intriguing, entertaining or useful.
  • Conversion boosts. How can you transform interesting content into conversions? The following statistics from LYFE Marketing (2020) illustrate the conversion power of Content Marketing.

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  eBook - ePub

  Digital Marketing Excellence

  Planning, Optimizing and Integrating Online Marketing

  • Dave Chaffey, PR Smith(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It’s useful to define a Content Marketing strategy since it underpins so many digital marketing techniques including organic search, social media and email marketing. It helps integrate activities across these channels, ensuring that quality content is produced, which is needed to gain cut-through, which is challenging given the amount of content produced in each sector.

  4.2 What is the scope of a Content Marketing strategy?

  Since Content Marketing relates to many modern marketing activities, it’s useful to have a sound understanding of what it involves within an organization. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, defines Content Marketing as:

  How a brand creates, delivers and governs original or curated content to attract and retain customers, positioning the brand as a credible expert and, ultimately, motivating a change in behaviour.

  It’s a useful definition; an effective Content Marketing strategy supports buyers at every stage of their buying cycle, leaving no gaps for prospects to fall through. As such, your Content Marketing strategy must help target audiences move through the customer lifecycle to purchase.

  Pulizzi highlights sets the scope to “brand” rather than “business,” which is helpful since it emphasises that Content Marketing strategy will often require a re-consideration of what brands stands for. In Personality Not Included, Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy New York (Bhargava 2008) recommends that brands may need to flex to engage audiences through content and particularly social media. At a practical level this will mean extending brand style guidelines from the dry world of point sizes and colour palettes to the tone of voice and style as highlighted in the next Digital marketing excellence box. Such guidelines can also highlight what the brand stands for since they should go beyond the tone to help support brand storytelling. As Seth Godin has said: “Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it” Godin (2009)

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  Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategies for Tourism and Hospitality Organizations

  • Ahmet Bulent Ozturk, Murat Hancer, Ahmet Ozturk(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Goodfellow Publishers

    (Publisher)

  This concep-tual review is hence conducted to answer four questions. 124 Digital Marketing and Social Media Strategies 1. What is Content Marketing? 2. Why is it highly relevant to hospitality and tourism businesses? 3. What are the significant impacts of Content Marketing on hospitality and tourism businesses? 4. What effective Content Marketing strategies can a hospitality and tour-ism business take? Literature review According to the American Marketing Association, Content Marketing is “ the publishing and distribution of text, video, or audio materials to customers online. Blogs, videos, and podcasts are common ways for businesses to engage in Content Marketing .” (AMA, n.d.) The Content Marketing Institute (n.d.) defines Content Marketing as “ a strategic marketing approach focused on cre-ating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. ” In a business-to-business context, Content Marketing “ involves creat-ing, distributing and sharing relevant, compelling and timely content to engage customers at the appropriate point in their buying consideration processes, such that it encourages them to convert to a business building outcome ” (Jävine & Taiminen, 2016). Regardless of its forms and distribution channels, the core information presented in Content Marketing is usually brand- or product-related. Some typical Content Marketing examples include infographics, webpage, pod-casts, videos, and books (Steimle, 2014). It is critical to distinguish ‘Content Marketing’ from ‘digital content mar-keting’. These two terms look almost the same. Some research reports and studies might even mistakenly use these two terms interchangeably. Digi-tal Content Marketing is essentially about the marketing of digital products.

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  No longer available |Learn more

  Social Media Marketing All-in-One For Dummies

  • Michelle Krasniak, Jan Zimmerman, Deborah Ng(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • For Dummies

    (Publisher)

  Developing a Content- Marketing Strategy CHAPTER 3 Developing a Content-Marketing Strategy 235 » Engage customers. Content allows your customers to chat with you. Whether it’s friendly banter on Twitter or a more opinionated discussion on your blog, they’ll appreciate having a voice. » Build links to your content. A content-marketing strategy is a link-building strategy. As long as you’re providing valuable content to your consumers, other businesses and professionals will link to your content so that they can share it with their own communities. All those backlinks are good search engine optimization (SEO). » Generate leads or new opportunities. Smart content leads to smart opportu- nities. For example, if you regularly blog on important topics in your industry, those blog discussions can land you new clients or speaking engagements. Not everyone uses his or her content for the same purpose, so you can’t count on doing what everyone else is doing online. Take some time to outline your goals before you begin. In the following sections, we describe several of these content goals in more detail. Driving traffic Traffic is a top goal in most content-marketing strategies. Businesses want to bring traffic to their websites that they can divert to sales or other sign-up pages, but they aren’t sure how to drum up interest. By producing relevant, valuable content, you’re catching the attention of the search engines. When you’re working out how to use your content to drive traffic, consider the following: » Guest blog posts: Your content doesn’t have to be only on your own pages or platforms. You can also consider writing a guest blog post for another blog. There are great benefits to guest blogging, including backlinks and creating brand visibility. Target the most influential blogs in your niche and read several posts before pitching to make sure you’re a good fit.

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  eBook - ePub

  Digital Marketing Strategy

  An Integrated Approach to Online Marketing

  • Simon Kingsnorth(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Kogan Page

    (Publisher)

  So lesson one, and perhaps the most important of all the lessons in this chapter, is to remember that it is nothing new. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel: what made good content 100 years ago still makes good content today. The difference is in the execution and delivery. What is Content Marketing? Well, for a start it is very broad: as we will see later, ‘content’ can take many forms. There are already hundreds of definitions for Content Marketing; in fact Google has 932 million results for the search term ‘definition of Content Marketing’ and those of you who have read the last edition of this book will recognize the significant growth from 692 million results in 2019 or just 53 million results in the first edition. So, rather than an encyclopaedia definition, let’s look at how an established content marketer would assess whether content is ‘great’ or not. Great content needs to be all of the following: credible shareable useful or fun interesting relevant timely different on brand and authentic. The unfortunate truth is that quite a lot of content produced fails to hit many of these markers and, unless it does, it is unlikely to succeed. Given this, these pillars of great content warrant further consideration: Credible Audiences are fickle, they always have been (even Shakespeare complained about it) and always will be. One sure-fire way to turn an audience off is to present them with content that lacks credibility. In short, they have to believe it. This does not mean that they require a robust data set to be behind every statement made but it does mean that the statements made need to be substantiated enough to be believable. Take one of the many quizzes that appear on Facebook, for example, that purport to identify what type of person you are. A common example is a quiz that ‘estimates’ your IQ by asking 10 questions

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  Digital Marketing Fundamentals

  OMCP's Official Guide to OMCA Certification

  • Greg Jarboe, Matt Bailey, Michael Stebbins(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)
• Should you change your website?
• Should you change your products/services?
• What is a product‐led content strategy?
• What are the benefits of product‐led video content?
• Should you adjust your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
• Should you change your Content Marketing metrics?

What Is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), which was founded in 2011, “Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

More than a decade later, this is still the best definition of Content Marketing that I've seen.

Note that “valuable, relevant, and consistent content” is being used like a magnet to attract and retain “a clearly defined audience.” But it also needs to be used like a screen that filters out disinterested or unqualified people “to drive profitable customer action.”

What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?

According to the CMI, Content Marketing has four key benefits:

• Increased sales
• Cost savings
• Better customers who have more loyalty
• Content as a profit center

The first of these benefits, increased sales, is also one of the goals that you can set in universal analytics to measure how Content Marketing fulfills your target objectives.

Content marketers can use Google Analytics to measure the number of conversions generated by a campaign, although “conversions” might mean making a purchase for an ecommerce site or submitting a contact information form for a marketing or lead generation site.

The second benefit, cost savings, is popular in organizations that want you to do more with less. And if you want to deliver cost savings, read my column in Search Engine Journal, which was published on Feb. 19, 2020. It's entitled, “Is a Super Bowl Ad the Equivalent of Lighting Money on Fire?