What is content marketing?

You’ve probably heard the term ‘content marketing’ thrown about in the business world but maybe you’re wondering – what is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain your audience. Your audience should be clearly defined and your content should, ultimately, drive positive customer actions.

The key words here are valuable and relevant – without these two things your content is just spam. You should be attracting your customers though interesting and valuable content, rather than hard sales pitches or flashing banners. The more valuable information you can provide to your customers the more likely they are to buy into your brand.

But here’s the key, content marketing is not about long, boring documents full of key words. It should focus on your audience and be too the point. Case studies, how-to guides, blogs, interviews, even infographics. You want to provide interesting information to your target audience and promote a change.

In the last two years content marketing has increased from 60% to 95% of a companies overall marketing strategy – because it works. Consumers aren’t interested in what you can sell them, they are interested in how you can help them. Remain consistent in your credibility and you will have won them over – it’s that simple.

Other benefits of content marketing

A further benefit is that content marketing also supports other digital marketing channels, for example by increasing SEO by boosting inbound links to your website through content that will be picked up in search engines. It also provides additional content for your social media channels to link back to, again driving traffic back to your website.

So, the next time you are planning your marketing strategy, think about adding some relevant and valuable content to your approach.