What Is Content Marketing?

Mike McGovern | Sep 26, 2012

Content marketing has made direct communication with potential buyers easier than ever. That’s not to say that content marketing is easy, because it isn’t. Content marketing tools and resources are inexpensive, or free, and plentiful (the easy part), but it takes time and patience for a business to build trust and to be found by an audience (the difficult part).

The goal, as always, is to eventually convert your audience into paying (and very loyal) customers. An obstacle is that people no longer want to be “sold” on a product or service (outbound marketing), and have more control over what information they receive and how they receive it. Companies now must utilize strategically placed content to attract and engage a new target audience (inbound marketing).

Here’s a useful infographic from HubSpot that explains inbound vs. outbound marketing.

The core of any effective content marketing strategy is education. Creating your own informative and relevant content will help your business gain trust, while educating your target audience about who you are and what your business cares about. Sharing others’ content from within your industry is also a viable option. Many content marketing outlets exist; for example, blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics. It’s an inexpensive and effective way to attract and build a loyal audience for your business without explicitly selling and turning them off.

Another benefit of fresh content is that it will help your website appear higher in search engine rankings. If, for example, you post to your blog 3–4 times per week, that fresh content plays to a key factor in search engine algorithms. Most of the major search engines also factor in social sharing (eg, likes, +1s, retweets) into their page rankings. It should always be in the back of your mind to create content that will motivate your audience to share it!

A good rule of thumb is not to constantly ask your audience to share (or retweet, +1, etc.) your content, but to make your content great enough that they will want to share it because it’s interesting and pertinent to them.

So what does all this mean?

A business that is not using strategic content is losing ground and will eventually fall behind. As audiences become more adept at ignoring traditional push (outbound) marketing (this is happening more rapidly now), pull marketing will become even more important to a successful marketing plan.