Just writing and publishing content is not content marketing
If you are simply writing and publishing content it is not content marketing. Content is the basis of your content marketing so obviously, without content, there is no marketing, but merely writing and publishing content doesn’t deliver you the needed results.
It is like this: you have a TV channel. You are broadcasting high quality movies and series. You don’t aggressively promote your movies and series. You simply produce them and broadcast them. The only viewers you get are those who are randomly channel surfing and accidentally come across your TV channel.
The same happens when you are writing and publishing content without doing anything else.
Marketing, as is the case with any systematic marketing campaign, is a collection of steps that you need to take or follow to get tangible results.
In content marketing, you create content, and then you draw people to that content. The drawing of people can happen through multiple channels. These channels include:
- Search engines.
- Social media and social networking platforms.
- Mailing lists.
- Back links from other websites and blogs.
- PC campaigns.
- E-books, case studies and white papers.
In simple terms, content marketing means publishing content and then not just promoting that content, but also taking steps to make sure that maximum number of people consume that content.
Aside from using the channels above, content marketing also involves using analytics tools available to you to monitor what sort of traffic your content is generating and then streamlining your content accordingly.
Take for example search engine traffic. The keywords and search terms you are trying to target, may not be getting you the needed traffic and people who find your website on search engine pages may be using totally different keywords and search terms. Through Google Analytics, you can find out which keywords and search terms people are using and then make changes to your content. This is also an ongoing activity.
Content writing and content marketing are ongoing activities
These are not one-time affairs. You cannot publish 10-15 blog posts and articles and then rest on your laurels. It’s because almost all your competitors are using content marketing to draw targeted traffic to their websites.
Since everyone is trying to get ahead of everyone, sooner or later your competitors are going to have more content than you have and consequently, more exposure than you have.
They will be able to create buzz on an ongoing basis and hence lap up all the traffic.
Since everybody has an online presence these days, competition is greater than it used to be a decade ago. Everybody knows about SEO. Everybody knows about social media marketing. Most of the businesses use email marketing.
Millions of instances of content are constantly being produced and published in the form of blog posts, webpages, press releases, PDFs, videos, infographics, images, articles and social media and social networking updates, every hour. Amidst this deluge of content, how do people find your content?
Writing content and publishing it and then marketing it constantly may overwhelm in the beginning, but once you begin to follow a pattern, it is just like any other business activity.
Every established business has a sales and marketing department. This means, marketing is required all the time.
The same is the case with content marketing. It is definitely cheaper than conventional marketing, nonetheless, it is an integral part of doing business.