The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing

Whether you love or loathe the saying, no marketer can deny that content marketing has the power to considerably boost your brand, develop a unique tone of voice and, most importantly, drive leads to your business.

Communication is Key

Without content marketing, there would be no SEO, PPC or social media campaigns, which are all dependent on content for optimization, keywords or promotions. Every tweet you send, every email you write and every landing page you create will depend on well-written, engaging content. You must therefore not look at content as a method to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs), but should view content as an effective way of communicating a message to your target demographic.

While traditional marketing is often forced upon an audience, good content marketing is a subtle form of advertising, as a person has the choice to engage with the content, which can promote goods or services. So, if you are not taking content marketing seriously within your business, you should be.

How Content Marketing Compares to Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising is a lot more invasive in comparison than content marketing, as it often depends on interrupting an audience to deliver a message. For example, a viewer can be interrupted by a TV ad or a passenger will read a marketing banner when on public transport. They, therefore, depend on the audience being unable to move, and they tend to reach everyone over a specific target market.

What’s more, traditional advertising is limited when it comes to timing, as marketers can only capture their audience attention for a short amount of time to convey their goods, services or brand. As well as being limited in both time and targeting, traditional advertising can be quite expensive.

Content marketing, however, works a little differently. It has the potential to provide a reader with real value – as they can choose to engage with a promotion. So, the modern advertising will not be forced onto an audience. They choose to engage with your brand.

There are different types of content marketing, such as:

Blogs
Infographics
Whitepapers
Downloadable guides
Podcast recordings
Product descriptions
Social media marketing
YouTube/Facebook videos

The aim of content marketing is to provide one of two things (or both): educational content and entertainment content. If you provide a reader with something of value, they are more likely to read the blog – and they are also more likely to return. However, if you lack a natural flair for words, you can choose to hire one of the many affordable freelance writers online.

How to Promote Content

The blogs can often be found on a website blog, promoted on social media or a link can organically be found in the SERPs, which a reader can choose to engage with if they fall in love with your title or want to learn more about a product or service. Also, online content promotion is significantly cheaper in comparison to traditional advertising. You simply write the article, upload it to the website and promote it online.

As you can target specific audiences with the help of paid social media posts, you can also directly target your desired audience to encourage engagement and drive leads. By producing well-written, informative and entertaining content, you can provide the reader with valuable content that could encourage them to learn more about your product. It can, therefore, result in a person purchasing a company’s goods or services, even if they initially thought they didn’t need the product.

Remember, the better the content, the more likely people will share it with their friends and followers across social media, which means more traffic to your website and a bigger annual revenue.

Write Valuable Content

You might be tempted to click open Microsoft Word and write the first blog idea that comes into your mind, but don’t. If you want a content marketing strategy to be a success, you must take the time to develop content that works for your business. Remember when we said that content marketing provides copy of value to the reader? Well, you must take this fact into account with every blog post you write.

While you might be tempted to write a detailed timeline of how you become a roaring success, we are sorry to report that the customer does not care about you. As cold as it might seem, they only really care about themselves.

So, if you want their custom, you must provide them with valuable information, instead of dull copy that is a complete waste of their time and energy.

There are different types of content you can create to engage with your audience, such as:

How-to articles
Informative guides
List posts
Entertaining videos

Care for the Customer Over Your Company

We cannot stress enough how important it is to care for the customer over your company when it comes to content marketing. While it might not make much business sense to not actively promote your products or services at every opportunity, too many promotions can cause your company more harm than good. 9 out of 10 times you need to developing articles that provide real benefit to the reader. You must, therefore, identify what makes your demographic tick. What do they need and what advice can you provide?

For example, if you offer software as a service (SaaS), you could provide a guide to the common pitfalls people experience with the cloud-based solution. If you run a retail company, you could offer an informative look at this year’s latest style trends to look out for over the next twelve months. By building up a loyal readership, your audience might be more likely to engage with that one promotional blog that could turn a lead into a conversion.

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