Everything you wanted to know about content marketing and were too embarrassed to ask.
By Lewis North
It’s the latest buzz word being bandied about – especially in the small business arena, but what the heck is it?
Content marketing is about providing relevant and valuable digital content that engages your audience, encourages sharing, builds loyalty and raises brand awareness. It’s about providing content that is fresh, insightful, useful, entertaining, relevant or educational, something that will build a relationship with your customer. Nobody likes something that bores you to tears, and it’s not about the hard SELL, SELL, SELL! It’s about brand loyalty and sharing the love.
You’ve probably already come across most types of content;
You know your audience already, now you need to understand the type of content they want, and when. Don’t create content for the sake of it, it’s a waste of time, resource and money.
When deciding on the type of content you want to create, it’s worth understanding the importance of balancing created and curated content. To explain a little further; created content is created by, or on behalf of your brand (say by an agency or freelancer). Curated content is about commenting and sharing existing content – sharing and commenting on links on Twitter and Facebook are a perfect example of this. There should be a balance between created and curated content, with created content holding around 65%.
Once you know what type of content you’re creating, you must ensure you deliver it on the right platform, at the right time. To do this, you should listen to your customers, what are they talking about? When are they talking? How and where do they want to be communicated with. You should also listen to your brand’s industry, are there any trending topics? You want to anticipate the needs of your audience.
And remember, it’s quality over quantity. If a website doesn’t have valuable content, it won’t perform well. Creating quality content will also help optimise its relevance in search engines rankings and support your SEO strategy.
Content marketing is by no means a quick fix, it’s an ongoing commitment. Creating the content whilst also listening to your customers is time consuming, but you shouldn’t be doing one without the other because you’ll risk creating irrelevant content or using the wrong platforms, both of which won’t achieve the sharing and engagement you need.
Thanks for reading and please do call me on 01908 886180 send me a message through the live chat below or email me on [email protected] – I’d love to hear from you.
