Content marketing is a marketing strategy based on building trust in your target client by means of useful, relevant and customized content, before promoting your products or services straight to them.
Grasping the concept of content marketing is easier if we analyze it from the user’s viewpoint. Let’s imagine, for instance, that you want to renew your bathroom. You still don’t know for certain which decoration you’ll prefer so you Google up something like “renewing your bathroom” to get some hints. You’ll probably find articles like these:
- 11 ideas to renew your bathroom on budget, where Homify gives you a list of ideas to renew your bathroom, while offering you different professionals to do it.
- 13 Big Ideas for Small Bathrooms, where Thisoldhouse magazine offers useful information with PPC advertising.
- Ideas and tips to renovate a bathroom with no bricklayers, article from Ovacen blog, a portal focused on sustainable architecture and design including a recommendation of their sponsor’s products.
All of these are examples of content marketing. They offer free, useful information, and in exchange, these companies attract a segmented audience to their sales funnel, such as in the case of Home Depot, or they increase traffic in sites paid for advertising, as it happens with Homify and Ovacen.
What is content marketing for?
It’s one of the cornerstones of Inbound Marketing and has 3 main uses:
- Attracting the target audience to the sales funnel and turn them into actual clients.
- Improving the SEO of a website.
- Providing content to share in social networks and e-mail marketing.
Actually, sales funnels, SEO, social networks and e-mail marketing are, basically, the other four cornerstones of inbound, and, as you can see, the content is an essential part of each of them.
Which is the content creation process in marketing?
To create useful content in digital marketing, first you need to be clear on how the sales funnel of your company works. For this, you need to fully know your Buyer persona (or buyers personas, in case it’s more than one), and their Buyers’ journey as well, which in time will give you an idea of the type of information that your prospect needs in order to become an actual client, and also, when and how they need it.
Ideally, the editorial calendar, that is, the document that determines which type of content is going to be developed month to month by a company, is thought of according to the goals of the company, the needs of the Buyer persona and the structure of the sales funnel.
Who is in charge of content marketing?
Content marketing is a process which goes along all the inbound stages, so it isn’t unusual having several people involved in the planning, creation and distribution:
- First, a marketing specialist and a SEO consultant will help you identify the type of contents that might work better for a company in order to attract clients, thus creating the editorial calendar.
- Then, it’ll be necessary to count on one or several editors, who can produce the required content, based on the given guidelines.
- Next, content usually goes to a web designer who gives format and adapts it to the distribution channel and to the corporate image.
- Finally, the marketing specialists come into action again to analyze the results of the content and, based on the data obtained, optimize the strategy as much as necessary.
Content marketing examples
Content marketing is not the sole domain of digital marketing. Actually, it’s been part of the traditional marketing strategies for years. Here you can find many examples of how it’s been used since the XVII century.
And here you can find 25 clever content marketing examples which stand out for their assertiveness and proper use.
This very article you’re reading right now is also an example of content marketing.
Keep learning
- What is Content Marketing – By Content Marketing Institute
- How to Develop a Content Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide – By Hubspot
- What’s Content Marketing – By Forbes
- Who Should Be in Charge of Producing Content? – By Convince and Convert
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