What is Content Marketing?
By Ayaad Damouni, Founder Capital D
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. The key word here is “valuable.”
It’s what changes this definition from one that could describe almost any form of advertising or marketing. You can tell if a piece of content is the sort that could be part of a content marketing campaign if people seek it out, if people want to consume it, rather than avoiding it. Content marketing can be entertaining, educational or inspirational, or a combination of these – but if it doesn’t fall into any of these categories then it’s most probably an ad.
Content Marketing for a brand sets to build a community post by post, through information and reinforcement of key messages in order to develop a sense of unity and understanding from that audience.
Some examples of content Marketing can be:
- Infographics
- Landing Pages
- Social Media
- Video Training
- Podcasts
- Series
- Books
Because of the value-proposition, knowledge based content does very well in serving a community and showing the expertise of your brand.
Why Content Marketing?
Perhaps more important than understand what content marketing is, is understanding why content marketing is important to your business. First we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:
- Awareness. Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
- Research. Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist, and which one will fit their needs.
- Consideration. At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
- Buy. Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.
Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before.
Have you considered a content marketing strategy for your business? Why not reach out to us : ask@capitalDstudio.com
Interested in working together? Let’s talk.
