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.
Also, Content marketing is a marketing strategyused 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.
Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you; they purchase your product and prefer it over competitors’ options.
In contrast to one-off advertising, content marketing shows that you actually care about your customers.
Today, more than ever before, people want to feel like they matter. The world is louder and noisier now, and keeping consumers’ attention is the marketer’s most valuable resource.
Keep that in mind as we look at some of the different types of content marketing.
Content Marketing Overview
When Joe Pulizzi founded the Content Marketing Institute in 2010, I don’t think he knew exactly how spot-on he would be, let alone how successful CMI would become.
The Institute is one of the top resources for content marketing statistics, and they’ve created a great video overview of the evolution of content marketing:
Since the foundation of content marketing is simply high-quality content and storytelling, you can already see that the concept has been around longer than the term itself.
There’s still plenty to learn from those first offline content marketing activities that pre-date the Internet, social media, and the like.
However, any successful content marketing campaign today can hardly ignore the online part. Because storytelling has changed over the years, different content styles and approaches get old quick. Make sure you’re creating content relevant to the year we actually live in.
There are three major categories where you can put content marketing efforts these days: online, offline, and hybrids.
The best way to learn how to be a great content marketer is by example.
That’s why I’ll show you some great examples of content marketing in all categories. Then, you can model them, tweak them, and apply them to your own businesses.
To begin, though, let me show you how you can create a content marketing strategy. Then, you can use the examples at the end for inspiration.
Strategy
Tons of different content marketing strategies exist today. I’m talking about things like social media, long-form articles, videos, and case studies.
At the beginning of the content marketing world, that wasn’t the case. At one time, marketers had few options. They essentially only had bandit signs, magazines, and newspaper ads.
Even in those days, however, they had various custom choices.
They could play with the words in their advertisements, the picture they showed, their placement of them, and the CTA.
In other words, although there were fewer content marketing methods, the options were still remarkably vast.
Today, more content marketing mediums and methods exist than ever before. That means that the number of strategies is even greater.
One online publication suggests using the “3D Content” model, for instance.
Basically, it’s three individual steps.
1 Map the content to the pain point.
2 Use the right type of content for that problem.
3 Finally, map the content to the buying cycle of the people who have that problem.
In a world with social media, endless Internet space, self-publishing companies, and free graphic design tools, the strategies you can use to attract paying customers are as varied as the fish in the sea.
Here are just some of the content marketing formats you can use:
Content curation
Opinion posts
White papers
Q & A’s
E-books
Newsletters
Alternatively, you could add a new level of creativity with:
Infographics
Slideshows
Online games
Quizzes and surveys
Mindmaps
Memes
Illustrations
Or you might build authority and create consumer confidence with:
Webinars
Behind-the-scenes pieces
How-tos
Free tools and downloads
Whatever you want to achieve, you can use content marketing to help you do it.
Well, as you can see, there are a ton of options, but don’t get overwhelmed.
You’re here to learn about the benefits of each option and when to use which one. While there’s only one goal of content marketing (to increase business revenue), there are many ways to do that.
However, before we can jump in and see how you can create your own strategy, you should first understand a bit of content marketing’s history.
Where did it come from? Why has it lingered? Why is it so popular today?
We’ll turn to those questions next.
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