What is Content Marketing?
Overview
Content marketing is often called inbound marketing. The term was coined by Hubspot with reference to the idea of increasing and capturing the inbound traffic to a brand rather than relying on advertising to raise awareness and increase engagement. The idea behind it is that advertising, especially in the online space is interruptive and an unwanted distraction from the actual work people are trying to do or information people are trying to find. Wouldn’t it be better if customers found a brand because they were solving their problems rather than constantly spamming them with unwanted advertising? There will always be a place for advertising and the brand building at scale that only comes with mass media but content marketing offers a better way to bring new leads to a brand and convert leads through the funnel.
With over 5.6 billion searches per day on Google, there is plenty of scope to provide the answers and services that people are looking for. If brands are effective at doing this within their niche search traffic will start to flow to their website as they provide relevant useful answers for searchers queries. If brands are driving organic traffic by search they can drive traffic through paid search advertising. How much better then to drive organic traffic rather than paid traffic. There is no such thing as a free lunch and it’s true with content marketing. It takes time, planning, effort and commitment but the results are worth it as your brand becomes discoverable online, and a genuine source of value to prospects and customers.
The only way to truly own an audience is to have a direct channel to them that you own. For most businesses, unless you’re Netflix, that channel is email. While socials are great, we don’t own our audiences and the Facebook’s and Linkedin’s of the world can and do change the goalposts. There was a time when Facebook exhorted brands to spend money to grow their number of followers before they moved the goalposts to reduce brands organic reach so that their audience just became a set to spend money to advertise to. What we populate the email channel with is the key to extracting value from the hard-won email list. Ideally content is personalised to people for their specific stage of familiarity with the brand and products. Providing relevant, valuable content to your audience at the right time in the right format builds trust and maintains awareness. However, without genuine thought and care email becomes another channel to spam your audience.
The Benefits
There are three main business benefits from content marketing; growing a brand’s audience, nurturing and maintaining the audience, and converting prospects to leads, leads to customers and customers to fans.
Grow
Content as an awareness play is really about search engine optimisation and promotion. Content is the key to search engine optimisation. While there are technical aspects of SEO, mainly on-page optimisation, there is no SEO without content. As search algorithms become smarter and are able to understand the meaning of content, rather than just counting keywords and links, the opportunities to game the system are reduced and the focus is on producing genuinely useful, relevant and engaging content with the reader in mind. The key has become persistent, quality content focused on the core subjects of value to the audience. Over time executing an SEO-focused content strategy will allow a brand to capture an increasing percentage of the total search traffic volume for ideas associated with their business. This process takes time, consistency and patience but yields results. A blog post takes approximately 100 days to mature to the point where it ranks. Often a brand will want to see immediate results and paid promotion of content through social, syndication and native advertising platforms like Taboola offer the opportunity to get content in front of the audience.
Nurture
Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia, in his seminal marketing book How Brands Grow identifies “mental availability” as “the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations”. The key to building mental availability within the target audience is repetition and reinforcement of brand identities and brand marques. Content, particularly across social and email has a role to play here. Reminding the consumer of the brand with constant connections keeps the brand front of mind so that at the point where a buying decision or a step through the funnel may take place the brand is in the consideration set.
Convert
Although a great deal of effort is spent driving awareness it is wasted if there is no strategy in place to move leads through the funnel to consideration, purchase and finally to becoming an advocate. This often involves capturing contact details in exchange for higher-value content or tools. Enough high-quality content must be placed before the gate to build trust before a customer is going to exchange details, promoting them to the owned audience we mentioned earlier. Testimonials can also be effective in building brand trust and converting prospects eventually to customers.
Process
As with any long-term undertaking, the key to success with content marketing is planning. The starting point is strategy and strategy begins with questions:
what are we trying to achieve
who is the target audience
who are the competition and what the environment the brand is working in
how will prospects be moved through the funnel
Answering these questions provides a platform to answer the bigger question. What is the niche that the brand can build content that will provide value to its audience, advance its business goals and where there is space to compete? From here calendars can be built, channels planned, roles assigned and measurement and optimisation protocols put in place.
Conclusion
Content marketing requires commitment. Its takes 6 months before any results will become obvious and require discipline and planning. It cannot be done on an ad hoc basis. The analogy of a flywheel is often used in association with content marketing. It takes a great deal of effort to get it moving but once it is moving it takes much less effort to keep it moving. Once a library of quality content has been created, it will continue driving traffic and engaging audiences for years to come. Creating additional content increases the value of the whole and the power of the flywheel. To get to that point takes discipline but once the processes are set up and become routine content marketing becomes business as usual and the leads and prospects generated become vital to the business.