Content Marketing Meaning
Content marketing is a strategy that emphasizes making a long-term relationship with the target audience by providing them with their desired quality content & forming and sharing videos, articles, and graphics. Are you all set to optimize your content, so you can go through various content marketing services to get a booster?
History of content marketing
Content marketing isn’t like Maggi (noodles) that can be made in two minutes. It takes years of hard work and brainstorming to come up with an idea and implementation.
Well to make you apprise, it dates back to the year 1732, a person named Benjamin Franklin published the first version of his book named Poor Richard’s Almanack.
What was his intention? Did he do that for his passion for writing? Nope! That wasn’t it at all. He did it because he opened a new printing business and wanted to make it famous all around the corner and he thought the best way to advertise was to print his book, potentially encouraging others to print there.
For a long time, businesses and individuals have tried to gain attention by creating free or cheap content for their audience.
Why content marketing?
Nowadays nothing is exclusive, or one of its kind. Everything has a bunch of competitors. There is a supermarket for people to select from, so why would they come to you?
That is the prime reason why content marketing strategy is important, it enables you to build a relationship with the audience, improve conversions, make you connect with the customers and most importantly it answers your audience’s queries. And, in today’s time, customers strive for high-quality, consistent, and engaging content from their favorite brands.
Content marketing strategies
You go to a shop to buy cosmetics and plenty of products are there but have you noticed all the different types are kept on different shelves or boxes? That is a strategy so that the shopkeeper could easily take out the stuff you asked for. In the same way, vast content marketing strategies exist today but the most applied one is famed as the “3D content model”, for example-
- You must map the content to the prime point.
- After that, you need to use the right type of content for that problem.
- Map the content in a way that can resonate with the buying cycle of the people.
This strategy is a path to move the focus away from what the marketer is trying to reach.
For content marketing, whatever the case is, you should always start with your audience. You should create content for the audience. Then, and only then, will the right person pay heed to you?
Content mapping
Ever went on tour? If yes, then before you start the adventure you keep your needy stuff, create a road map, choose the travelling path, and many more. The same implies to content marketing, the content marketer plans to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time that is known as content mapping in a nutshell.
In deeper words, you may say, “Content mapping is the act of understanding your people (audience) so well that you can then create content for each step of their trek toward buying your product.
Few steps that you need while content mapping.
- Set your goals: For a good start of your content strategy plan, you need to set out a ‘mission statement’ that contains your targeted audience, and the content used to reach them and the benefits they will receive.
- Establishment of KPIs: Setting key performance indicators is a great way to achieve goals. KPIs will insight you as to what you need to plan to achieve in terms of revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, email marketing, and social media metrics.
- Know your audience: For a successful marketing strategy, you should know your customers to create authentic content. For this, put your focus on two major points
- You must collect demographic data for example their age, gender, education, and income.
- Get feedback from your customers, so that you can be aware of their feelings and can work towards improvement.
- Assess your current position: There are already your competitors that have taken their place in the market, you must be assured that your content is making you profit or not, or what kind of content you should be creating to be creative and unique.
- Search out the best content channels: You must be smart enough to get a sense of where your audience is hanging out, where you already have a successful online presence. For instance, the majority of the audience is found on YouTube.
- Decide on content types: You must think about what type of content you need to create, you must go for blog posts as they are capable of delivering strong results as they are actionable, valuable, and shareable and may include a range of articles.
- Identify and allocate resources: You must be prepared for the allocation of roles, who is suitable for what kind of work.
- Create a content calendar: You must be aware of when to publish the content.
- Create content: You must become Dr Strange and do lots of research on the content you will create.
- Distribute and market: The key part of your content strategy is distribution and marketing, without them you won’t be able to get the results.
Some examples of how content writing works
- Blog posts: Blogging is the most famous form of writing, and has contributed majorly to the business benefits.
- Social media posts: The majority of people are there on social media, creating social media posts can increase your audience.
- Website content: A website is a huge piece of content writing that is often seen as content. It also includes frequently asked questions.