What is content marketing?:
Content is anything that adds value to the anthology’s life. – Avinash Kaushik
Content marketing is a type of marketing, which involves the creation and exchange of online accouterments similar to vids, blogs, and textbook sharing on social media, which doesn’t explicitly or directly promote the brand, but aims to give content that benefits the followership and motivates them to interest in its products or services. The Content Marketing Institute defines it as an approach to strategic marketing, concentrated on creating and publishing precious, applicable, harmonious content, to attract and maintain a easily defined followership, which ultimately drives them to make purchasing decisions. Instead of directly marketing your products or services, you provide useful and relevant content to customers and potential customers, to help them solve their problems. Content marketing is used by major brands such as P&G, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, and John Deere… And many others.
What is the importance of content marketing?:
- Effective content helps build relationships, gain customer loyalty and trust, and attract potential customers.
- Customer confidence will turn into feedback (purchase decisions) and referrals, thereby raising sales and profits.
- Saves marketing costs, because choosing a type of content marketing with the lowest cost (for example, blogging) and focusing on it, will save you a lot of marketing expenses.
- It contributes to keeping users on the site (this is what search engines prefer), and therefore your
- content reaches a larger number of visitors and an audience that turns into customers.
- It contributes to educating others by widely disseminating knowledge, information, and values among the public.
- Content builds a good reputation for brands, the more unique and useful the content offered by the brand, the more it gains the respect of customers and competitors.
- Strengthens your position as a market expert in your field, which helps you achieve many of your goals.
Characteristics of good marketing content:
1. Affordable and valuable for everyone
2. Be shareable;
3. It should be relevant to your products
4. Make content marketing unique
5. At the right time
6. It should be of high quality and draw attention
Types of content marketing:
1. Blogging:
One of the most powerful types of content marketing, which is relatively low cost, companies hire content writers to write various and different articles on topics related to products, provide benefits to consumers, answer questions they ask, provide solutions to the problems they face that are related, as usual, to the product or service that the company will provide. Companies compete through articles to occupy the top of search engines, some companies provide reviews about their products and provide explanations to customers on how to use them in the form of articles, or reviews
2. Infographic:
A visual representation of information or data, which helps to simplify a complex topic, or bring to life a boring topic, is designed to transform information, statistics, or data into a visually attractive graph. Infographic has become one of the most attractive types of marketing because it contains simplified drawings, images, and information, presented in a light way to readers in a way that shortens their time and effort to understand the topic.
3. The video:
One of the most popular types of content marketing, videos are designed with a duration ranging from 2 to 5 minutes, on certain topics, video topics are usually derived from articles, follower questions, and other text content, videos are uploaded to the company’s website, or various social networks such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter… The phenomenon of video involvement in marketing campaigns has spread widely among large, medium, and small companies.
4. Research and studies:
It is one of the most reliable types of content marketing among customers, everyone trusts numbers and statistics. Therefore, the participation of the company’s efforts in searching and obtaining information is one of the most important reasons for customers ‘ trust in the brand. Doing research in your field and sharing it with clients, proves how professional and professional you are.
5. Electronic books:
One of the most valuable types of content marketing, companies are looking for questions that concern customers, so they offer solutions by launching an e-book that is available for download for free or in exchange for subscribing to the mailing list, which gives more credibility to your business, enhances customer confidence in you, and enhances your position in the market as an expert. If you want to create long-lasting content that is shared by customers, you should know why and how to use e-books in marketing for your business.
How to choose the right content?:
1. Target audience:
The audience you target with your product or service plays a big role in choosing the content you will share. It is important to be aware that gender, age, and even geography are important for you to choose the type of content. The Red Bull company Red Bull likes to use video marketing because it offers content to athletes and lovers of adventure and risk because which is better than publishing articles, designing infographics, or even offering e-books.
2. Type of product or service:
In addition to the importance of the target audience, the product you offer or the service is very important for you to know what content you are going to offer. Blender manufacturing company (Blendtec) discovered that posting fun and funny videos about its mixers is more feasible than any other type of marketing, so the company began to reduce marketing expenses and turn to post videos on YouTube that show the challenge that mixers are able to grind anything (such as the experience of grinding iPhone 6 Plus with a blender), the videos have found great popularity on YouTube and3. Consider the stages:
The stages of introducing customers to your product affect the type of content you will choose. At the beginning of your journey to promote brand awareness, focusing on videos is more useful than focusing on written content.
