What is content marketing?
Contents
Content marketing is often pointed out as an important part of the marketing strategy of companies wishing to acquire customers via the Internet. To meet this goal, we present what content marketing is, what are the types of content marketing, and we list the benefits of using content marketing skillfully.
Content marketing is often pointed out as an important part of the marketing strategy of companies wishing to acquire customers via the Internet. To meet this goal, we present what content marketing is, what are the types of content marketing, and we list the benefits of using content marketing skillfully.
Content Marketing – definition
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that relates to the creation of content and its publication in such a way as to persuade the recipient to act (e.g. to make a purchase decision). As a rule, content marketing is a prolonged activity that focuses on building long-term relationships with the recipient.
What are the forms of content marketing?
The basis of content marketing is writing a blog and posting content on your website. Materials posted in this way are usually guides, articles, reports, expert content, product descriptions, interviews and short information notes.
Additionally, it is worth mentioning the so-called sponsored articles. Posting paid articles is, firstly, a kind of advertising, and secondly, it is a way to get valuable backlinks, which is important in the context of SEO.
Content Marketing is a broad term that refers to a wide variety of materials, not necessarily just articles. Examples of forms the content marketing include: e-books, infographics, webinars, videos, podcasts or social media posts.
What are the communication channels that content marketing uses?
As you can see, content marketing uses different tools in the form of different materials (many of them were mentioned above) and different communication channels. The role of a communication channel can be played not only by your own website, but also by social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Instagram), music services (e.g. Spotify), video services (e.g. YouTube), websites serving as a repository for presentations (e.g. Slideshare) and any other sites where you can simply post content through sponsored articles.
What are the benefits of using content marketing skillfully?
Content marketing is primarily about building long-term relationships with the recipient. With the help of content marketing, trust and an expert image are built. This is one of the first steps in the purchase path. A potential customer, after going through our content, e.g. an article on a blog or a video, acquires knowledge about a given product or service. If the content is presented reliably and credibly, the potential customer gains confidence and is willing to make a purchase decision. For some products and services, the path between reading the content and making a purchasing decision is very long and may take months or years. In this case, content marketing gives what in marketing jargon is sometimes called “lead heating”. However, content marketing does not always have to mean image-building activities. Sometimes the publication of content transforms into more measurable effects. For example, publishing a sponsored article or organizing a webinar can translate into increased website traffic or conversion (e.g. in the form of a purchase or form filling, etc.) in just a few hours.
Website positioning – optimization for search engines
Another benefit of content marketing is strengthening the position of the website in search engine rankings, i.e. the so-called page positioning. The impact of content marketing on SEO can be understood in at least two ways. First, the content placed on the page ensures that the page contains relevant keywords and is better perceived by the search engine’s algorithm. Secondly, placing content with a link (preferably with the dofollow attribute) to the landing page is the basic way to get the so-called backlinks (i.e. links that affect the “power” of a given domain in the eyes of a search engine).
Summary – content is king!
In summary, content marketing is a concept that encompasses a wide collection of diverse marketing activities. The form of presenting the content may be varied, besides, the communication channel (place of publication) may also be different. Content marketing is not limited to running a blog and supplementing the website with content.
In our opinion, content marketing is very important nowadays, because clients like to cooperate with the partners whom they trust. And it is the valuable content that builds trust. The ability to reliably present a product or service is undoubtedly a great competitive advantage.
In addition to purely sales- and image-related aspects, content marketing is becoming more and more important due to the fact that the Google search engine greatly appreciates those pages that produce valuable content. Content marketing is one of the pillars of SEO.
Summing up, it is worth noting that it is now easy to come across the phrase “content is king”, which clearly illustrates the important role of content marketing.