You’ve just heard someone remark on “content marketing”. You get the idea you should already know what it is, but you’re too uncomfortable to ask anyone. Congratulations, this post is for you.
Content marketing is defined this way by The Content Marketing Institute:
“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience; with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
The key word here is valuable. It’s what changes their definition from one that could describe any form of advertising or marketing. You can tell if a piece of content is the sort that could be part of a content marketing campaign if people seek it out, if people want to consume it, rather than avoiding it. So was VW’s 2014 “Game Day” commercial, which has been viewed on YouTube almost 18 million times as of the writing of this post, an ad, or content marketing? The answer is it’s both, depending on how it’s received by each individual who is exposed to it. The same will apply to any piece of content marketing you create, depending on whether the recipient received value from it or not. Of course the goal is to provide as much value from your content marketing to as much of your target audience as possible. At this point, despite this definition and explanation, you’re probably still wondering what exactly content marketing is. We can get more clarity by considering a few examples.
Five Content Marketing Examples
There are as many types of content marketing as there are types of content–far too many to cover here. My goal is to introduce you to content marketing. Think like a content marketer so you’ll see the opportunities all around you. Soon you’ll develop 50 or more content marketing ideas every day. You won’t stop seeing opportunities to create content. Here are five examples to help your mind start creating.
Infographics
These are generally long graphic reports that include statistics, charts, graphs, and other information. Infographics can be effective in that if one is good it can be passed around social media and posted on websites for years. You can get a professionally designed infographic by hiring a contractor on a site like oDesk or if you want to remove some of the risk you can go with a company like Visua.ly. A decent infographic will usually cost you at least $1,000 to have designed, but can cost several thousand dollars if you are hiring a contractor or agency to include strategy and planning, research, copywriting, and design. There is also the matter of promoting that infographic to bloggers and the media. Or you could set up a board on Pinterest and curate infographics on a topic related to your niche. That is also a form of content marketing, and it costs nothing but your time.
Webpages
What’s the difference between a normal webpage and a webpage that is content marketing? Consider The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz, a provider of SEO related tools and resources. This resource, offered for free, has been viewed millions of times. It has brought in countless customers. Or take a look at a case study from the design firm Teehan+Lax. Most case studies are boring. Their case studies are fascinating. That’s the difference. You can just put content on your website, or you can do content marketing.
Podcasts
Michael Hyatt, author of the best-selling book “Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World“, practices what he preaches. His “This is Your Life” podcast is downloaded 250,000 times each month. Hyatt, in his blog post, “4 Reasons You Should Consider Launching Your Own Podcast”, says, “A podcast gives you visibility in a completely different world; primarily iTunes. I have had scores of new people say they had never heard of me until they stumbled onto me in iTunes.” Hyatt gives valuable information and advice in his podcast–all for free. But that podcast leads to more sales of his books, signups for his courses, and requests for him as a speaker.
Videos
Gary Vaynerchuk is a master of content marketing using online video. Just take a look at his YouTube channel. He got his start creating videos to promote his family’s wine store and through those videos and other online marketing he eventually grew it to a $45M empire. Videos and podcasts are a largely untapped form of content marketing because people think it’s expensive and hard. But with the falling cost of professional grade equipment creating high quality video and audio content is easier than ever. Amateur video content marketing has been used to sell blenders, launch new dental products, and market Hong Kong visa consulting services. What video could you throw together for your business that might change your fortunes overnight? It might be easier than you think.
Books
Like movies, people often think of books as selling themselves, but knowledgeable marketers don’t sell books just to sell books, they sell books as marketing tools. Michael Port’s sales manual “Book Yourself Solid” is a great read for entrepreneurs, salespeople, and marketers, and while I’m sure Port enjoys selling his book, the book is a tool for driving customers to his coaching and speaking services. Although with self-publishing it’s easier than ever to publish a book, there is still the perception that it’s difficult and that only reputable professionals can publish a business book. Publish your own, and even if people don’t read it you can still use it as a form of content marketing every time you’re introduced as “Author of…”
Those are just a few examples of content marketing. I could also have mentioned white papers, ebooks, apps, public speaking, presentations, and blogs. Entire books have been written on using each of these in content marketing efforts.
Why Content Marketing?
Perhaps more important than understand what content marketing is, is understanding why content marketing is important to your business. First we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:
Awareness
Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
Research
Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist. Then he will try to determine which ones fill his needs.
Consideration
At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
Buy
Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.
Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before.
The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal if executed correctly.
Content marketing also provides additional benefits in that it supports other digital marketing channels. It provides additional content for social media marketing, and contributes to SEO efforts by generating natural inbound links, and building up good content on your website that gets found in search engines. In fact, for many companies the bulk of their SEO efforts should be focused on content marketing.
How Do I Get Started?
If you want to jump in and do your own content marketing the easiest way is to start blogging. It will likely be hard at first, but the more you do it, the better you’ll get at it. Following tips from websites like Copyblogger you’ll quickly learn how to craft content for your website or blog that will engage readers and turn them into customers or clients. But while technically good writing and the right headlines can help, it’s not the key to creating great content that is the best form of content marketing.
Great Content
If you’ve ever slogged your way through reading a piece of marketing and only finished reading because you had to, then you’ve experienced bad content marketing. Content is great if people are willing to pay to read it. If you want to see great examples of content, just look at what you’ve paid to read, watch, or listen to lately. If you watched The Lego Movie this year, you saw one of the greatest examples of content marketing to date. Oh, you thought they made that movie in order to sell movie tickets? Think again. That was a 100 minute toy commercial, and rather than using a DVR to skip it you paid good money to watch it. Is it any coincidence that Lego recently leapfrogged Mattel, the creators of Barbie, to become the largest toy company in the world? You may not have the budget to make a feature film to promote your business, but you can still give potential customers valuable information.
The #1 Secret of Content Marketing
Add value. That’s the secret. It’s not really a secret at all. We’ve already talked about it throughout this post. We skip advertising when it provides little to no value. If you want to learn about advertising that doesn’t get skipped, find a skateboarder and ask him if you can watch him look through a skateboard magazine. He spends as much time looking at the ads as he does looking at the articles and photos. Or check out The Berrics website. Much of the content is advertisements, but skaters don’t skip these videos, they watch them. Just like they watch the other videos, because they’re getting the value they want–good skating. As a skater I’d like to say skateboard companies pioneered content marketing decades ago, but I know they were only doing what came naturally, and selling more product was secondary to the fun of creating videos and magazines. If you want to hire someone onto your marketing team who understands content marketing intuitively, hiring a skateboarder might not be a bad step.
If you’re not sure how you can add value through content marketing, ask your existing customers what kind of content you can produce that would be helpful to them now, or would have been helpful to them when they were looking for your product or service. They’ll tell you.
Most internet marketers are not doing real content marketing…yet. That’s why you’ll have an advantage if you jump in. Tell me how it goes!
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