Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The goal of content marketing is to build trust and credibility with your target audience, and to ultimately drive profitable customer action through content that is relevant and valuable to your audience. It is a long-term approach that involves creating and distributing valuable content to your target audience, with the goal of establishing trust and credibility with them over time. Content marketing can be used to achieve a variety of marketing goals, including generating leads, building brand awareness, and increasing sales.
Being aware that the power has shifted to the consumer and that brands need to create value for him in order to build a relationship that will lead to a business-marketing dialog, brands are quickly moving (not necessarily professionally) to Content Marketing activity, which is called: Inbound Marketing.
Content Marketing addresses the creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content for a defined target audience with the clear goal of attracting and gaining its attention and building a long-term relationship that can eventually turn into a business one.
What are the business goals?
- Awareness of the company brands
- A relationship that supports consumer loyalty
- Differentiation of the brand’s products / brands
- Customer retention
- Sell & Upsell
There are three steps in Content Conversion
- The Introduction stage
At this stage, the brand offers its potential customers content and information based on its initial acquaintance with them. This stage is characterized by a negligible commitment on the part of the consumer and low involvement. This stage includes in many cases YouTube’s brand channel, blog, podcast, interviews and tutorials.
75% of interactions related to content marketing end here, in the introductory stage.
- The basic bonding stage
This stage is a deeper one in terms of the dialog with potential customers and includes activities such as social friendship and followers, invitation to demo or webinar, as well as subscription to content products such as newsletters.
22% go through this stage of a slightly more in-depth familiarity with the brand’s content.
- The opportunity stage
Only 3% of those who initiated the content process reach a trusting relationship that enables a market-business dialog. This stage includes steps such as “contact” and actual purchase.
Target Audience:
When planning a marketing move based on strategic entry into the content field, it is necessary to define the target audience in such a way that will improve the chances of success. The combination of proper social networking activity and familiarity with the brand’s digital asset, users will enable the brand to find the right audience for this content activity.
The right audience should at least be a “listening audience” who is willing to watch or read the brand’s content. If we can find and create a dialog with an active audience and / or those who are early adopters of ideas and products similar to the brand, they are also likely to be active in creating the content and conveying it throughout their social environment.
The optimal target audience is the Passionates who have a passion for the category. Those who are aware of any new relevant content which is uploaded to the network, add it, distribute it and talk about it on and off social. This is the desired goal of any brand starting a real content marketing strategic activity.
Content mix:
A brand that strategically addresses the content area is required to have a true mix of content which consists of 6 main content types.
- Evergreen Content – relevant content that can be used by the brand every few weeks or months.
- Snackable Content – if you create written content – make it short. This type of content can be easily produced by the brand’s content personnel keeping it original and relevant.
- Video/ Visual content is also important for a dialog with the younger generation to ensure sufficient user collaboration.
- UGC – Content produced by users is necessary for any content or community platform. It is attractive, wins a higher reliability score than some traditional content, and gains a high level of collaboration.
- Content curation – using third party content which is relevant and valuable.
- Audio content
Content distribution mix
Social networks of any kind (Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, etc.) are the most important tool for distributing branded content. These platforms enable the brand to locate its right audience, broadcast its content, and track its performance in the interaction with its target audience.
In addition, the brand has a variety of options for distributing content – email marketing, working with Influencers and micro-Influencers,, dedicated content platforms such as Outbrain and, programmatic campaigns to promote content and, of course, smart organic search engine optimization.
Every content activity needs to be measured – same as how the market measures the performance of advertising campaigns.
What do you measure?
- Brand exposure
- Interaction with brand content
- Conversions A (from People To Visitors) / B (conversion from Visitors to friends or followers) / C ( conversions from friends to active customers) / D (converting people to being your brand’s promoters).
Quality and relevant content can help the brand move the potential customer through all the required steps – from his first entry and exploration stage through the friendship stage up to the marketing-business dialog one.
The new marketers are increasingly adopting new market thinking based on insight:
Think like a publisher
Some brands create only product-centered content, with its advantages and benefit. Some brands have risen to the level of added value content – namely, information about how the product and its environment can improve, add to or change the life of the customer, including additional features (e.g., a food company offering a recipe application and advice).
Brands that have made the content area their strategic anchor have implemented a peripheral content approach – content that is not directly or indirectly related to the product, but rather a new content field that may be of interest to the brand’s target audience. For example: Redbull took ownership of Extreme Sports. It has nothing to do with the company’s original product, instead they sought to connect to a desired target audience through continuous, professional and differentiated content activity. One way or another – there is no brand, small or big, that can afford to avoid the strategic area of Content Marketing.