Content marketing is the most important marketing channel in the digital marketing. It is about creating, publishing, and distributing content to attract, acquire, and engage your audience and convert them into customers. Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising. It’s is a long-term strategy that focuses on build trust and relationships with your audience.
Benefits of Content Marketing
Generates new leads
Drives more sales
Increase visibility
Increases site traffic
Improves customer retention
Builds a community
In order to be effective, content must meet the needs of target audience preferably in a surprising and different way. Your content must work to inform, educate, entertain or emotionally satisfy your target audience.
Educating content – this is the content that to teach your audience about your product or service. It gives people more information on what your business does and how it can help them. Infographics, eBooks, webinars, press releases, videos, podcasts, blog posts, whitepapers, guides, templates, checklists, trend reports, answers to FAQs, case studies etc. fall into this category.
Online banking service Mint, for example, uses educational blog posts to explain everything from how to budget to how to save money by making fancy coffee drinks at home. Mint. com was the first company to create infographics to attract customers on a mass scale – that resulted in 2 million customers within 3 years.
Entertaining content is a great way to grow your reach and expose yourself to new audiences. It is not directly related to products, but it helps to appeal to your target audience and create a relationship of trust. This content can be memes, fun facts, puzzles, original pictures, contests & giveaways etc. Users tend to discuss and share content a lot more when it affects them on an emotional level.
Emotional content – primarily uses emotional appeals to make audiences notice, remember, share, and buy from you. Marketing with emotional content is twice as successful as the marketing using the informative content.
There are positive and negative emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy. Using negative emotions like sadness helps you deliver a sense of empathy or compassion. Emotional content creates public awareness of social issues like violence, gender equality, poverty reduction, immigration, and others. Therefore, it is preferred for social campaigns. These emotions motivate people to act and donate money to improve bad situations.
Types of Content Marketing:
Blogging
Video
Podcasting
Infographics
Email/Newsletters
Visual content
eBooks
Lead magnets
Whitepapers
SlideShare presentations
Quizzes/tools
Checklists
Courses
Webinars
Slide decks
Free apps
Social media posts
