The focus of content marketing is creating, publishing, and distributing content to a targeted audience. It is used by businesses to increase brand awareness and credibility, attract attention to a business’ website in an effort to generate leads and increase sales. Content marketing can also be used to engage with a community of users which represent past, current, and future customers.
Some examples of content marketing are
- interviewing a customer using a product and writing about how the product helped the customer
- writing about a holiday and the benefits of using a specific product or service
- introducing an infographic that shows how specific products or services give an advantage over competitors
- howto videos
- downloadable whitepapers that forecast trends and the future of the industry and where a company will be in the future.
The topic of the content is usually planned a year in advance and placed on a content calendar so everyone has enough lead time to prepare for the release by
- setting up tracking and goals
- setting up campaigns
Some of the pitfalls of content marketing are
- not having a clear objective of what is achieved
- thinking your latest article or video will be viral. Promoting through social media and SEO, advertising is still required.
- just giving statistics and features only. Storytelling and the showing benefits of why a product/service is success is important.
- sticking to one channel. Vary delivery channels. It may be a blog post one month, a YouTube video the next month, followed by a podcast.
When you’ve finished your article and are ready to add a link back to your website, remember to exclude nofollow and noreferrer. Once your article is published confirm the absence of nofollow and noreferrer.
A great example of a content marketing campaign which turned viral video was for Dollar Shave Club. The video cost $4,500 to make and within 48 hours had 12,000 people signup for the service.