What is Considered Good Content Marketing?

What’s the buzz about content marketing? It seems that we’ve heard it getting louder and louder as technology advanced through the years.

True enough, content marketing has progressed as technology has provided more platforms to do the job more engagingly and appealingly.

Most people think that content marketing has just been around a couple of decades since the availability of marketing platforms on the internet.

Social media platforms, especially have made it far easier for businesses to communicate with their customers. But content marketing dates back to 1672 when the clever Jan van der Heijden used various modern marketing techniques to introduce his invention to the masses and earned success.

Included in his marketing program was the use of white paper publication, a book, visuals, social sharing, demos, and consultative selling.

Content Marketing for Business Owners Defined in a Nutshell

Nothing makes it easier to understand what content marketing is than Michael Brenner’s to the point explanation: “ Content marketing is about attracting an audience to an experience (or ‘destination’) that you own, build, and optimize to achieve your marketing objectives.”

Instead of simply pitching your product or services, you help your audience (prospects and customers) solve their issues by providing certain relevant and useful content. Simply put: your audience shapes your content.

How Content Marketing is Done for your Business

High-quality content is more commendable when it helps you reach your business goals. You would want to know the specific information that will eventually bring the desired results.

A content marketing strategy should be able to answer the following questions:

• Who should the content we produce be most relevant to?
• What benefits does this audience receive from consuming our content?
• What desirable and distinctive content experience can we consistently deliver?

A content marketing strategy is a unified, strategic road map focused exclusively on how your business will use content to attract, acquire, and engage its prospects and customers.

With a content marketing strategy that outlines your business and customer needs, you will be able to channel your content efforts to understanding your audience in-depth, create content to solve their problems, and eventually grow your business.

Seth Godin outlines 4 qualities that your content needs to have:

• Emotion: What do you want people to feel?
• Change: How are you changing people with your product or content? Does that emotion change them in a way that helps your brand, product, or service?
• Alert: Once you’ve changed someone, how do you build the privilege of being able to tell them when you have something new?
• How can you get people to tell each other?

With the content marketing strategy and qualities that your content should have in mind, you can choose to present the information to get your audience engaged in a variety of formats. The most popular content marketing formats include:

1. Blog Posts. A great place to start with the lowest barrier entry by far. With a great headline, useful content, and an effective featured image, you’re good to go. Nearly 80% of companies that use blogging as a part of their content marketing strategy reported acquiring customers through their blogging efforts, according to a recent inbound marketing report.
2. Videos. Creating a high-quality video and audio content is easier than ever with the falling cost of professional-grade equipment to create them. Research shows that 51% of marketing professionals name video as the type of content with the best ROI. Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
3. Podcasts. Get your busy audience passively listen to your content and bring in more engagement. Your podcast can make your business visible. Take, for example, Michael Hyatt who garnered more sales of his books, signups for his courses, and requests for him as a speaker because he gave valuable information and advice in his podcast.

Step-up your Content Marketing

There are so many types of content marketing available since technology has allowed the involvement of such.

Content Marketing Institute adds seven, less frequently used content marketing formats to give you more opportunities to create new, fresher content and add value for your audience:

1. Infographics. Turn statistics, data, and loads of seemingly boring information into a visually-appealing, interesting, easy-to-understand infographic that can be passed around social media and posted on websites for years.
2. SlideShare decks. Small chunks of information with images make this a visually appealing format.
3. Quizzes. Turn your blog posts into quizzes. Buzzsumo reports that eight of the 10 most-shared articles over eight months were quizzes.
4. Live streaming. Grab the attention of your audience and receive feedback almost immediately. Talk about topics that will engage them in your business.
5. Video storytelling. Increase web traffic by engaging your audience to an episodic content to captivate their fancy towards your business.
6. Instructographics. Consider transforming your content into an engaging instructographic that will answer your audience’s needs in a step-by-step process.
7. Gamification. M2 research reports that gamification can lead to a 100 to 150% increase in engagement. Experts believe that gamification can increase conversion seven times. People simply enjoy playing games.

How your business can benefit from Content Marketing

Getting more people engaged in your business is not the sole benefit your business will have from worthy content marketing. Here are specific benefits your business will get:

• Strong brand awareness
• Respect and admiration in the industry
• Indirect customer conversions
• Increases site traffic
• Improved SEO
• Direct customer conversions

Businesses have invested smartly in content marketing understanding the effort that has to be performed.

With these efforts, your business can be found by potential customers, you can build an interested and engaged audience that will continuously engage in your business, you will gain the trust of your audience who will eventually become your new customers, you will have increased revenue from creating more loyal customers, and you will have reduced marketing costs.

Weighing whether content marketing is what you should be doing for your business or thinking it might be risky to allocate resources for such is not a feat you should ignore.

Doubtless, high-quality content marketing involves a great deal of work, patience, and persistence.

The bottom line is your business will have increased sales, cost savings, and more loyal customers. After all, real good content marketing is giving something of value to get something of value in return.