Tag Archives: Content Marketing Explained

The never changing fundamentals of content marketing

The content marketing fundamentals never change, whether you started using content marketing for your business back in 2004 or you are playing with it in 2017. These fundamentals are

Publish relevant content
Publish content that provides solutions and solves people’s problems
Publish content that is engaging
Publish content that is shareable – people not just feel like sharing your content, but it is also easier for them to share it
Publish your content regularly
Analyze your content and do the needed modifications
Keep your existing content relevant and updated
Use the right channels to promote your content in front of the right audience

As you can see, these are the fundamentals, no matter what technology you use, no matter what sort of content you publish, and no matter what audience you are trying to reach. Even when people were painting on the walls of their caves, they were using these content marketing fundamentals to convey their message and leave the glimpses of what was happening to them, for the future generations.

Let’s read a bit more about these fundamentals of content marketing

Publish relevant content

Every business niche has its own relevant content. When you come to my content marketing blog, you expect to read about content marketing, content writing and general related topics of how to promote your business through content marketing and content writing. This content is relevant to you if you want to use content writing as a marketing tool or if you want to hire someone who can help you use this tool. Sometimes I also write on search engine optimization but ultimately it is connected to content marketing.

The importance of relevance is always going to be there no matter what format of content you publish.

Publish content that provides solutions and solves people’s problems

We are all looking for solutions. People come to your blog because they seek some advice or some bit of information that they can use to solve some problem that they have. If they repeatedly find solutions on your blog or website, if you are constantly solving people’s problems, your content marketing is going to succeed. You need to give them a reason to access your content repeatedly. You need them to crave for your content and share your content. This only happens when they find your content useful.

Publish content that is engaging

This is a redundant point but I’m going to cover it anyway because it is one of the most important aspects of content publishing and content marketing and almost every, in fact, every content marketing expert talks about “engaging content”.

By engaging content, we mean content that stimulates people and encourages them to actively consume your content, participate in the ongoing conversations around your content, and even contact you to share their own opinions about your content. This way, you have engaged them. You have created interesting content to get them interested.

It is just like speaking in front of a live audience. You provoke them. You ask questions. You ask counter questions. You debate them. You create controversies. You create adulation. The moot point is, engaging content gets your readers or your audience involved, whether in a positive sense or in a negative sense depends on the relevance of the topic. When you engage them, they remember you and whether they like you or not, they come back to your website or blog.

Publish content that is shareable – people not just feel like sharing your content, but it is also easier for them to share it

Sharing means endorsement. When people share your content with each other it means they like it and find it useful. This helps search engines. Although algorithms are very advanced these days, it matters how people think of your content. So when your content is shared it means it is appreciated. It solves the proverbial problems.

Sharing should be easier. These days it means all the sharing buttons should be incorporated into the webpages and blog posts that you publish. Also, your content must be formatted in such a manner that it makes sense with least interference. This means, when people share your content, they shouldn’t need to modify the title and the description because in themselves they should be able to tell a lot about your webpage or blog post.

Publish your content regularly

The never changing fundamentals of content marketing mean when you are publishing content, you are building a broadcasting channel, and when you have a broadcasting channel, you need to broadcast on an ongoing basis. This is one side of the story. The other side is that in order to enjoy good search engine rankings due to content marketing and content writing, you need to feed the search engines with an unending supply of content – yes, as long as you operate your business on the Internet, you need to provide content to the search engines to be crawled, indexed and ranked.

This means you need to publish your content regularly. Now, regularity doesn’t mean you publish every day. Although publishing everyday might be very good for traffic and social engagement, for some businesses it doesn’t suit. So, define your own regularity. Maybe it’s okay to publish 3-4 blog posts or webpages every week. Or maybe one blog post or webpage every week. Or maybe randomly. The important thing is you need to update your blog or website regularly, on an ongoing basis. It shouldn’t feel like an abandoned blog or a website.

Analyze your content and do the needed modifications

Beyond doubt, when you are publishing content on your blog or on your website, your ultimate aim is to draw traffic. This means you need to analyze your traffic and see what sort of traffic is being drawn by the content that you publish. Sometimes you end up drawing wrong traffic. Even tiny things can mean a sea change.

You can analyze your content by a web analytics tool like Google Analytics that tells you what sort of traffic your content is drawing. If most of the visitors landing on your website or blog are using wrong keywords, you are not publishing the right content. If your website or blog is attracting at least some amount of traffic that uses the right keywords, study those pages and blog posts and then generate similar content.

Or maybe your existing content is relevant but you are not using the right language? Analyze constantly so that you don’t end up with a ton of useless content.

Keep your existing content relevant and updated

Millions of webpages and blog posts are being published every hour and then these webpages and blog posts are being crawled, indexed and ranked by the search engines constantly. So, even if initially it was possible to find your content, with so much of newly generated, fresh content available, your content is pushed back and it becomes difficult, and sometimes even impossible, to find it.

Search engines want fresh content. Even your visitors need to have a compelling reason to visit the same URL gain.

You can keep your existing content relevant by updating the webpages and blog posts with newer information, better-researched data, and even with changed perspective. Even if one sentence is changed, mark that link changed and resubmit it to the search engines.

Use the right channels to promote your content in front of the right audience

Every channel, every broadcasting medium, has its own audience. Facebook users like particular content, Twitter users like different content, and LinkedIn users want to find content that can help them in their businesses, professions and careers. If you want to give beauty tips, better focus on Facebook and refrain from posting that sort of content on your LinkedIn timeline. If you want to rake up political or cultural controversy, fire off a few tweets.

It’s very important to choose the right platforms. Even the Google search engine is a channel.

These are the never changing fundamentals of content marketing. Just as the applicability of wisdom transcends time and cultures, so do the fundamentals of content marketing. Your content may change, how you distribute that content may change, the tastes and preferences of your audience may change, the format of your content may change, but these fundamentals never change.

What is Content Marketing? Explained in detail

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Although, by the beginning of 2016, 88% marketers admitted that content marketing is an integral part of their overall marketing strategy (source), very few understand what is content marketing in its true sense and why it is more effective than traditional marketing.

If you don’t feel like reading the entire blog post, in the video given below I have explained in detail what content marketing is and how it can help you grow your business:

In terms of process and strategy, content marketing can be represented through the following tangle:

The three main steps involved in content marketing are

Developing useful content
Publishing that useful content
Distributing that useful content

These are the fundamental activities but these activities can be further expanded into more points:

Studying your market to know what sort of content is needed.
Developing useful content according to the conclusion of the study mentioned in step 1 in such a manner that it also allows you to talk about your business.
Publishing your content using the platform preferred by your audience (you find this through step 1) – your own blog or website, guest blogging on other blogs and websites, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, email newsletters, Medium, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc.
Distributing your content through the channels preferred by your audience – your own blog, guest blogging on other blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium, email newsletters, Snapchat, Tumblr, etc.
Using web analytics to study what sort of impact your content marketing strategy is making (now step 1 becomes a combination of step 1 and step 5, so now this is the new step 1).
Continue with step 2 onwards.

By developing, publishing, and distributing highly useful and valuable content over a long period of time (the steps mentioned above) you develop a platform for yourself.

People begin to relate your presence with great value.

What is valuable content in Content Marketing?

It depends on your business. You can develop, publish and distribute useful content by

Keeping people informed
Educating people
Making them laugh or making them feel sentimental
Reviewing products and services for them
Providing them privileged information

Basically, providing them something they value, something that they don’t mind getting access to or being delivered on an ongoing basis.

This, is what valuable content is.

What is content marketing according to renowned marketers?

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly-defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

~ Content Marketing Institute

Content marketing is the process of developing and sharing relevant, valuable, and engaging content to target audience with the goal of acquiring new customers or increasing business from existing customers.

~ Amanda Maksymiw

Content marketing is a device used by companies to educate, inform or entertain customers or prospects by creating attention or causing behavior that results in leads, sales or advocacy.

~ Jay Baer

Content Marketing is anything a company creates and shares to tell their story. It is conversational, human and doesn’t try to constantly sell to you.

~ Ann Handley

Content marketing is, creating a following of dedicated audience through providing valuable, timely and relevant content to people over a long period of time, so that they begin to trust you and want to do business with you on their own.

~ Amrit Hallan

Why content marketing works better than traditional marketing?

Traditional marketing, as you already know, is one-way. You’re constantly telling people to do business with you whether at that time, they want to do business with you or not. The traditional marketing doesn’t care whether people want to hear from you or not.

Traditional marketing uses channels that have already been built. The entire process is unscientific. People come across your marketing message when they are least expecting it or even when they are feeling hostile towards it.

Content marketing on the other hand, allows you to build your own broadcasting channel. When you develop and publish useful content, people seek you out to access that content on their own. You don’t have to advertise. People come to your website or the platform you use to publish your content, on their own.

By developing, publishing and distributing useful content on a prolonged basis, you develop a loyal audience of people who look forward to hearing from you.

You, your business name, or your brand, becomes familiar to them and they begin to trust you because of the non-stop value you deliver.

After you have successfully implemented your content marketing strategy, there are two ways people will do business with you:

Scenario 1: They need what you provide and they know you provide it and since they already know you and trust you, they approach you rather than someone they don’t know.
Scenario 2: You tell them what you provide and if and when they need it, they are going to get it from you rather than someone they don’t know.

So, the basic purpose of Content Marketing is, to be present in people’s lives in such a manner that you provide value to them on an ongoing basis while making sure they always remember what business you are in.

Once you have created such presence its positive impact is long-lasting.

10 facts about content marketing people are constantly getting wrong

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The good thing is that more and more businesses are understanding and recognising the power of content marketing. The bad news is, most of them don’t really understand what content marketing is and they are constantly running behind quick fixes. The presumed facts about content marketing, if not totally wrong, are not what they should be, and consequently, when business owners and entrepreneurs don’t see any positive results, they get disenchanted and worse, also start discouraging others from pursuing content marketing.

The thing is, if you are barking up the wrong tree is it the fault of the tree or your judgement? Obviously your judgement.

Listed below are 10 facts about content marketing people are constantly getting wrong.

1. Content marketing means improving your SEO

Most of the businesses want to publish lots of content because they want to improve their SEO. Trying to improve your SEO is not a bad thing but if you are using content marketing for this purpose, it’s an overkill. Content marketing is a complete mechanism, a complete process, of getting people to your website and then turning them into your customers and clients. By simply focusing on your SEO you may improve your search engine rankings and hence also increase organic traffic, but if you don’t focus on your branding, if you don’t get recognised for your quality of content and if you don’t target your audience, all your traffic will go waste.

2. Content marketing shouldn’t cost much

By this I don’t mean it should cost more but many business owners presume that since it is just writing, it shouldn’t cost the way other services (web designing, accounting, programming, etc.) cost. Like any other service, writing, producing, publishing and disseminating content is a real activity and people require expertise to carry it out. It takes years of training to consistently create quality content that remains true to your brand identity. Besides, content marketing isn’t always about writing and publishing content, a major part involves promoting your content and responding to user behaviour.

Just in the morning I come across a website selling “well-written” articles for $ 1.25 per article. At the surface it might seem quite enticing. Just imagine the amount of content you can get for $ 1.25 per article. But have you ever considered why such writers are never hired by businesses that actually make money? Even eHow, a company known to have made millions of dollars through AdSense-supported content, was paying or is paying $ 15 per article. And that’s not even “well-written” content as you may come across on many professional websites.

The point is, when you are looking for a serious, committed and professional content marketing service, extremely low cost (for example, $ 1.25 per article) shouldn’t be the only criteria. Dependability, expertise, writing quality and marketing experience should come as a complete package.

3. Content marketing is for big businesses

People are more comfortable with conventional advertising and they are also familiar with the way it works. You advertise and people respond to your advertisements. When it comes to content marketing many small businesses think it’s a fuzzy concept that requires lots of money and involvement. You daily come across questions like “what exactly is content marketing?” But how often do you come across something like “what exactly is advertising?”

Due to lack of awareness many people think that content marketing is for big businesses that can invest lots of money and hire multiple employees to create high-quality content around their brands, publish that content, broadcast it and then generates lots of buzz as well as inbound traffic.

I’m going to contradict myself yes, $ 1.25 per article can work for many businesses looking for lots of product and service descriptions and if these product and service descriptions are well-written and if you can post these product and service descriptions on your social networking websites or even broadcast them to your newsletter subscribers, this is an example of good content marketing.

Just as you can have an ad during the Super Bowl, you can publish pamphlets on your printer and distribute them in your locality; these are both examples of advertising.

Similarly, whether you storm the Internet with a celebrity endorsement or 5 hundred articles and press releases in a week or you consistently publish a single blog post every day and then promote it on Facebook and Twitter these are all different levels and forms of content marketing and hence, whether you want to pursue content marketing or not doesn’t depend on your business size, but on your strategy and your understanding of content marketing.

4. Provided your content is well-written, there is no need to target search engines

Although your rankings primarily depend on the level of competition you face, the quality of your content, the way you have used the language and the phrases, directly impact your SEO. Google’s SEO guidelines clearly state that write content in such a manner that it is good to read, easy to access and stick to the point and if you stick to these guidelines, you automatically improve your search engine rankings. But many content marketers believe that you should totally disregard search engines.

Whether you want to target search engines or not is your own prerogative, but you can get lots of targeted traffic from search engines because millions of people use them to find relevant information. But creating high-quality content for your target audience doesn’t mean you should ignore SEO. You can follow SEO practices while creating high-quality content. I do that on my website and blog and I also do that for my clients I can maintain the balance even while creating keyword-century content.

The problem is not with overly focusing on SEO or totally ignoring it, the problem is with getting carried away. The problem is either focusing on your audience completely or focusing on your SEO, completely. Maintain a balance. Write content for humans but use keywords and key phrases that these humans use on search engines in order to find the information you have published.

5. You cannot predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy

Well, using the same logic you cannot even predict the success of conventional advertising. Nobody has been able to create the perfect formula for ensuring the success of conventional advertising. Nonetheless, since it’s being done since time immemorial, people are more trusting towards conventional advertising and a bit cynical towards content marketing.

So, can you predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy? This Oracle report (it is a PDF) precisely calculates the ROI of content marketing and how you can definitely make out how much improvement you’re going to experience with your content marketing strategy provided you do all the right things. For example, in the very beginning of the report they write that “per dollar, content marketing produces three times more leads”.

Saying that you cannot predict the success of your content marketing campaign or strategy is akin to saying you cannot predict whether you are going to get more business or not by installing a telephone or by opening a new branch in another locality.

Content marketing is a platform. It’s a communication channel. It’s an engagement mechanism. What sort of business you get is a byproduct of the platform, the communication channel and the engagement mechanism you can establish.

6. Content marketing only means creating lots of fun content for the B2C market

When people approach content marketing from this angle they immediately feel discouraged when they realise that they are either serving the B2B market or their product or service is not “interesting” enough to warrant content marketing success.

Yes, fun stuff does well but only in terms of creating buzz and to an extent also brand awareness but even if there is no fun factor (and who says there cannot be fun factor in serious business?) content marketing can be one of the greatest tools to put your point across and make a presence for yourself.

If you think content marketing is only for a B2C audience, you will be surprised to know how Intel is using content marketing to strengthen its presence. You very well know that Intel is as B2B as it gets. It cannot directly sell its microchips and other hardware products to consumers. But it can certainly encourage consumers to purchase electronics and gadgets that use Intel products. Remember “Intel Inside”? It was a very clever marketing tactic. In fact to promote its content Intel is publishing a complete magazine called iQ.

Although as a small business or even as a medium-sized business there is no use trying to emulate Intel, but the point is, content marketing can be used for every business. The problem is not with content marketing, the problem is that sometimes people don’t understand how to use it and turn it into a formidable inbound marketing tool.

7. Content marketing should deliver fast results like conventional advertising

Frankly, it can, and it cannot. It depends on your market, your content marketing approach and the reaction of your audience. Having said that, remember that content marketing is not a machine or a formula. It’s a platform. It’s a channel. Take the example of a television channel. For a few months every channel has to work without getting advertisements. Then, as its audience builds up it begins to get ad revenue. The same happens with your content marketing. First you need to make a presence. People need to relate you to your content quality. This takes time unless you have got lots of money, like Intel. Even creating and writing quality content takes time.

The problem on the Internet is there is lots of noise and “voice” is rarely heard and when it is heard, since there is already so much noise vying for your attention, you either end up ignoring the voice or soon forget about it. In order to remember the voice, you need to be exposed to it repeatedly, on an ongoing basis. This “voice” is quality content. You need to constantly publish and distribute quality content in order to maintain your place in people’s memory. Again, this takes time but once you have embedded your voice inside people’s minds, you have got them as your customers and clients for life.

8. Promoting content is secondary to publishing content

Going back to the Intel example, its Global Paid Media & Content Strategist Luke Kintigh rightly says that

We have the mantra that for every dollar and hour spent on content production, it has to be matched with a subsequent dollar and hour devoted to amplification. Being agile and quickly acting on early distribution insights is also critical to optimizing recently published content as well as iterating and creating more content that will stick with your audience based on what youre seeing resonate.

A big part of content marketing is, what the phrase so eloquently says, “marketing”. You have got content, and you have got to market it. Marketing your content means making sure that your content reaches the right audience. No matter how great your content is, unless people know about it, unless the content is at a place where it can be found without much fuss, unless people can be brought to your content, unless there is a mechanism that attracts your target audience to your content, you aren’t going to achieve much success in content marketing.

9. Once you have gotten a certain number of blog posts and webpages, your content marketing is done

Content marketing isn’t publishing twenty blog posts or publishing ten webpages or submitting twenty-five articles to article submission directories. Yes, they help you, but in order to show some tangible results, content marketing needs to be an ongoing process. In fact, let us call it a process rather than a “campaign”. Let us call content marketing a part of the business. For example, you need to make phone calls regularly to your prospects. Do you call this exercise “making calls campaign”? No, you do it every day as a business development exercise. The same is the case with content marketing. Quality content writing, production and distribution is an ongoing process.

You may think, “Heck, does it mean ongoing expense?” but this is not the case. Don’t take it as an extra cost, take it as an operational cost, just as you need to pay the office rent, the electricity bill, the telephone bill, the Internet access, remuneration to your employees, etc.

Content marketing is one of the best things to have happened to small business owners because it empowers you to compete with the big guys by being innovative, persistent and quality conscious. The trick is, yes, being persistent for a long time and publishing and distributing content your target audience is looking for.

10 Quantity try and is over quality

Precisely this is the reason why many entrepreneurs and business owners find the idea of hiding content writers charging $ 1.25 per article enticing. You can get tons of content at an extremely cheap rate. Well, the problem is, you also get cheap content, most of it plagiarised and full of grammar and spelling mistakes. Of course there are exceptions. Exceptions are everywhere. And if you want to base your content marketing on exceptions, well, go ahead.

But if you really take your business seriously, don’t compromise on quality.

Feeling confused about content marketing?

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When more than 80% B2B businesses vouch for content marketing, you must think, what does it actually do? Why is there so much hype about content marketing, especially on the Internet? One of my clients recently said that the only businesses making money out of this content marketing hoopla is the people who provide content marketing. It is just like the Gold Rush – the people who got rich were the ones who were selling the tools to the people who were rushing to find the gold.

They get content marketing all wrong. It is a process, it is not a campaign. As it is rightly said, it is a strategy. It is the way you promote your business in contemporary times when your prospective customer or client is constantly being bombarded by thousands of messages. And this problem is not just on the Internet, even on television there is so much content that it often becomes very difficult for quality content to be noticed.

Besides, people have developed this tendency to ignore advertisements. Content marketing gives you an opportunity to provide value to your prospective customers and clients without imposing on them.

Before doing business with you, people want to get to know you. They don’t want to see advertisements. It doesn’t make sense to hold casual conversations with them because they are never going to get comfortable on a personal level, unless, again, they know you properly. So what do you do? You create and publish content they are attracted to.

You see, content is everywhere. On the Internet, when people are not accessing their email (which is also in a sense content, but let’s ignore that) they are accessing content. They visit news websites. They watch YouTube videos. They check social media updates. They seek information about products and services. They read blogs and articles. Whatever they do, they are accessing content.

Nobody is forcing them to access that content. Nobody wakes them up in the morning and forces them to log onto the Internet and check their Facebook and Twitter updates. Nobody threatens them if they don’t check your blog. They do it on their own. That, is the strength of content and if you can leverage it, you understand the power of content marketing.

Why are most people confused about content marketing?

This is understandable. They don’t see any sense in continuously coming up with new blog posts, articles, infographics and videos and post them and then share them on social media and then try to engage people. They would rather do business, and if they want to promote their business, there is advertising. They are hung up on conventional advertising methods.

The problem is perhaps with the expression “marketing” and whenever there is a mention of marketing, the reference to advertising automatically creeps in. Marketing means advertising in conventional sense and since content marketing doesn’t feel like conventional marketing where you launch a campaign and then you wait for orders and leads to pour in, things become a bit blurry.

Just imagine from the perspective of a person who doesn’t know anything about content marketing. All he or she knows is people are writing detailed blog posts and articles and publishing them. What exactly are these publishers trying to achieve? This is something that needs to be explained. I mean, if I’m writing this blog post, what exactly am I trying to achieve? This is a Sunday afternoon. Wouldn’t I rather be enjoying myself or reading a book or something? If nothing, just sit in the sun? What are people trying to achieve when they are publishing content, when they are creating it, when they are talking about it and when they are distributing it?

Have a look at the graphic that I have taken from this Content Marketing Institute blog post that talks about how engagement and leads take center stage in businesses using content marketing in the United Kingdom.

Content marketing organisational goals in the UK

As you can see, most of the businesses using content marketing in the United Kingdom use it for

Engagement
Lead nurturing
Lead generation
Brand awareness
Sales
Customer retention/loyalty
Upsell/cross-sell
Customer evangelism

Yes, “sales” is there but it is one of the goals of content marketing. Yes, “lead generation” is also there but it is also one of the goals of content marketing. Major goals also include engagement, brand awareness, customer evangelism and lead nurturing.

Content marketing gives you a presence. You provide useful content to your audience and your audience begins to relate that content to you. The search engines get more content to index and rank. People on social media and social networking websites get more content to share and talk about. People get to know about your expertise. They know that you are a good communicator. They know that you have lots of knowledge with you and you are eagerly sharing that knowledge with your visitors.

Coming back to the blog post that I’m writing right now – whom would you rather work with if your business needs a content writer? Someone who simply tells you that he or she is a content writer and that’s it, or someone who continuously shares his knowledge and experiences and tries to engage you into a dialogue so that the confusion about content marketing is dissipated and you can make use of it in a more informed manner?

But how does your business actually generate more sales with content marketing?

These days people need to know their brands in order to be able to do business with them due to multiple reasons and one of the main reasons is, multiple businesses are selling the same sort of products and services. The same sort of smart phone you can get from any company but still people buy the iPhones even when there are far more superior phones available in the market? It’s the presence Apple has made. They have loyal customers. They have brand evangelists. There is a prestige value involved. People are actually proud to own an iPhone (even if in private they envy their friends who own other phones).

There were many circumstances that contributed towards Apple attaining the sort of influence it attained, but the same sort of influence can be attained through content marketing, and there are many companies already doing that. Thousands of people are constantly writing about how great almost all Apple products are. People claim from the rooftops that they are Apple evangelists. Thousands of blog posts are written almost every day, although in the case of Apple, many of these blog posts are voluntary, but that’s another issue. The main point is, you can find tons of content on the Internet about the iPhone even if you are not familiar with the name of the company. You stop anybody on the road who is in a position to purchase a smart phone and he or she knows about the iPhone. It’s not just advertising. It’s constant writing. It’s constant video production. It’s constant photography. It’s constant conversation on social media and social networking websites. If you want to find something about the iPhone on the Internet, there is no dearth of content available on it. Result: the company can make around $ 42 billion in just a single quarter.

But what about a small business?

There is just one Apple. No matter how many are there, you can count the major smartphone companies on your fingertips. But what about a small business facing competition from thousands of vendors? How does a small business generate sales with content marketing?

Small business content marketing achieves the following for you:

Increase your presence on the Internet
Encourage people to talk about you, your product, your service and your brand
Establish yourself as an authority figure
Improve your search engine rankings
Become a regular part of the lives of your prospective customers and clients
Give people a reason to subscribe to your newsletter
Educate your prospective customers about how your products and services can benefit them
Bridge the gap between your business and your customers and clients by regularly engaging them
Provide something valuable to your prospective customers and clients without expecting anything in return
Create a vibrant and engaging presence on social media and social networking websites

An often-neglected advantage that a small business has is that it can strike a personal rapport with its prospective customers and clients which is difficult for a bigger company to achieve. You can write or produce much-focused content specially catering to your target audience.

What the heck is content marketing?

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Aren’t we constantly talking about content marketing? But what the heck is it, recently asked one of my clients.

I could totally relate to his confusion, I mean, does it make sense to go on publishing blog posts and articles hoping that after reading them people will do business with you? Even if that is possible, for how long one has to keep on publishing?

As a content writer who makes a living off providing content writing and content marketing services to my clients, it’s very important that I’m able to explain to them why the heck they should pay me, and that too, on an ongoing basis.

The clients who get what is content marketing and why their business needs high-quality content have no problem. Some of the clients understand that their business requires content marketing but they don’t have much clarity. I’m happy to get their business, but while I’m working for them, it is my constant effort to help them understand exactly what I’m doing and what it is going to lead to.

What the heck is content marketing?

Content marketing basically means creating, publishing and disseminating content, useful and highly relevant content, to a targeted audience in return for their attention. The scarcest commodity on the Internet is attention. There is too much distraction. There are way too many options available on the Internet and it often becomes extremely difficult for people to choose one business in favor of another. For instance, how do you know whether you should hire me as your content writer or another person?

In order to help you decide in my favor, I need to get your attention in a positive manner. I should be able to convince you, that whenever you need a reliable content writer, you should come to me. How do I do that?

One option for me is to constantly advertise my services. But the problem with advertising is one, it is too expensive for me (the last time I checked, Google AdWords charges almost $8 per click for the term “content marketing services”) and two, conventional advertising is interruptive and hence less effective. Even if I advertise on Google, I have enough data to prove that given a choice, people prefer to click links that naturally appears in the search results (due to the strength of their content) rather than those that appear by the side as sponsored links.

Content marketing is all about making connections with people rather than stuffing your messages down their throats. Once you have made connections, people do business with you not because they have seen your advertisement but because they have trust in you and they really believe that you’re going to deliver on your promise. They come to your website or blog on their own – this is called inbound marketing.

Does content marketing simply mean writing and publishing lots of content on your website or blog?

It differs from case to case, but “content marketing” per se doesn’t simply mean writing and publishing content on your own blog or website. Merely publishing your content doesn’t solve any purpose. Your content must reach the right audience or the right audience must reach your content in order to make an impact. This is where content marketing helps you. But yes, you cannot do content marketing meaningfully unless you have lots of valuable and compelling content on your website – if you don’t have anything to market, what do you market?

Here is the basic essence of content marketing:

Publish highly relevant and useful content people are craving to get.
Publish your content in multiple formats because different people prefer different formats – blog posts, articles, white papers, social networking updates, PDF files, videos, infographics and slides.
Use different platforms to distribute your content – as mentioned above, simply publishing content doesn’t do much good to you. The right people must avail your content. For example, if I want to promote my content writing and content marketing services then people who may someday actually need my services must somehow be able to access my content.
Build your mailing list so that you can constantly keep in touch with people who have shown even a little bit of interest in regularly hearing from you (that’s why they submitted their email ID to your mailing list); provide them high-quality content so that when they actually need your product or service, they remember you.
Establish yourself as an authority – it’s easier to trust people whose authority you respect. Once people trust you for who you are they do business with you more eagerly.
Constantly engage people – engaging people means interacting with them and responding to their feedback.

Why content marketing is better compared to conventional marketing or advertising?

For advertising you are paying constantly but this is not the cased with content marketing. Once you have established yourself (at the fraction of the cost of conventional marketing and advertising), once you have built good stock of content, once people have come to know you and what value you offer, your customer acquisition cost begins to move towards zero. Once you have gotten better search engine rankings for the quality of your content, you are not paying for every click the way you do with PPC programs. Just imagine, coming on the first or the second page of search results and getting 100s clicks everyday without having to pay them.

In monetary terms, let us suppose, you pay me $35 for a blog post that ranks well. Assuming you are paying $0.50 per click, for 70 clicks you will be paying $35. But if you’re getting your clicks due to my blog post, after those 70 clicks, you are paying nothing. And you’re not just getting traffic from search engines. Many well-written blog posts and articles go viral on Facebook and Twitter and massive amount of traffic can be generated.

But it’s not about money when it comes to content marketing; it’s about creating a credible presence on the Internet. People need to trust you. You need to be familiar to them. They should be comfortable because they know you have always been there. Through your content marketing they can easily find you on search engines, different blogs and websites, on your own blog and website and, websites like Facebook and Twitter. For them it is very reassuring. Conventional advertising can never accomplish this.