So, what is content marketing?
We talk about this, everybody talks about this everywhere. But do you really know "what is content marketing"?
In today’s digital world, the strategies your business uses to reach your target audience have undergone major changes in the last decades. Content marketing has become the most necessary element in the digital world to find potential clients and attract and retain them.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing all online materials such as videos, blog texts, photos, social media posts aimed at generating interest in products and services. It can benefit any business regarding
nurture leads,
drive sales with analytics and keyword research.
Content marketing also boots revenue, improves search engine rankings, and creates digital marketing collateral to attract audience attention. Providing useful and relevant content can create a strong connection between your brand and your potential clients that is continuously growing and getting stronger.
Your potential clients need valuable and attractive content from your business and that content should reach them in a way that feels natural and organic. With the most effective content marketing strategies, you can attract people’s interest towards your brand’s proposals and increase your brand awareness.
What are the types of content?
Content types may vary according to customer expectations and user demands. As content marketing tools become more responsive and advanced, content marketers can find the opportunity to host more dynamic types. To answer the question of “what is content marketing”, the first step is to know the content types.
That's why there are many types of content marketing that you should consider incorporating into your strategy.
Here are the most common content types:
Blog posts
What is content marketing? When they hear this question, most people will think of blogs.
Blogging is one of the most used and most powerful types of content marketing. By sharing blog posts, you can explain your purpose and topic most creatively and effectively. Blog posts allow you to transform your website into a powerful marketing tool.
By creating engaging blog posts with visual elements such as photos, statics, via links and infographics, you can ensure your blog is well-formatted, informative, and easy-to-understand. Sharing blog posts regularly builds a brilliant reputation as a trustworthy and quality content marketer.
Here find the unexpected blogging statistics after the Corona crisis.
Social media posts
Social media is another favourable strategy. To show your potential clients how good your social media presence is, you should engage with them continuously through social media platforms that they are already using daily, such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Your social media posts appear in front of your potential customers while they are surfing on social media platforms. In this way, your content marketing efforts allow your brand to expand and to be recognized more.
Infographics
Infographics are the graphic format that displays content, data and information in the easiest way to understand. Infographics are far easier to read than a list of numbers and facts. The fact that it can present a large amount of information on statistics, research, and data in an easy-to-understand way makes it loved by the readers.
Engaging infographics are shared more often than any other type of content on social media, therefore they can surely help you grow your audience. To ensure clarity, combining simple phrases, short statements, and images in an infographic is the simplest and smartest idea to make your content more effective.
Ebooks
Ebooks are electronic books of long-format content. They are mostly downloadable as PDF or HTML formats. The goal of ebooks is to
share your industry knowledge on a given topic,
promote an in-depth level of expertise,
reach more audiences,
boost your keyword ranking, and much more.
Ebooks have a wide range of benefits, including lead generation, establishing authority, beefing up your overall content. Moreover, they are providing valuable insight for readers.
Videos
Video has become an increasingly popular form of content creation as people watch all kinds of media. You can get a chance of keeping the viewer's attention with a few seconds of a video clip.
Videos are easy-to-use and easily accessible, therefore, it has become a must-have content format for businesses of all sizes.
Any type of video content such as live video, video blogs, animations ensures you
engage the audience,
increase conversations,
drive traffic to your website,
increase re-shares.
Just like ebooks and other types of content we mentioned above, the primary purpose of a video should be to provide value to your potential clients by pointing out key topics, providing relevant information, generating solutions, and answering frequently asked questions.
How-to guides
How-to guides are extremely helpful types of content.
First of all, you have to know how to make informative how-to guides. How-to guides can consist of long articles, attractive videos, and informative graphics.
Most importantly, it should be easy-to-understand, free of unnecessary information, guiding, and not confusing. To ensure all of these, you should add many images to your how-to guides.
Make sure you provide complete information that readers need to achieve their goals in your how-to guides.
Case studies
Case studies are the description of a real issue experienced by real clients, and how your product overcomes that challenge. It's the type of content that can be a huge help in gaining leads by discovering a true story about a satisfied customer's experience.
A positive and real case study of your business can increase your trustworthiness and expertise in the eyes of users backed with proven success. The more specific results you can demonstrate and the deeper you can dive into your process, the more people will believe that your company can be effective.
Finally, to make this content engaging and relatable, you should think most creatively and effectively of it as a success story rather than a case study and focus on the hows and whys of the story.
Podcasts & Webinars
Podcasts are an engaging and effective type of content to reach users for people who don't like to read long texts and blogs about your business.
Podcasts enable your content to reach your customers by listening to your content whenever they want. In addition, you can specify other factors such as what you are talking about in the podcast, how long podcasts are.
Another type of content Webinars.
Webinars are online seminars that you can create and host for your audience. They can be presented live or recorded. Webinars are extremely effective for increasing customer engagement rates and increasing market results.
Most importantly, you should make your webinars interesting and relevant to keep your audiences engaged and make sure your webinars are not too long, otherwise, they will be boring.
Final words
When we talk about “what is content marketing," we have mentioned how we apply content marketing to our marketing strategies. Once you know the content types, you grasp the main idea of content marketing. Therefore, it’s much easier to create efficient content strategies.
As you can see, content types can benefit your business in many fields. It is the best way to reach your target audiences by offering quality and interesting content. With good content, you can
improve your website,
transmit your brand’s values,
get more traffic,
reduce marketing and sales overhead,
attract and retain your potential clients,
get higher search engine rankings,
strengthen lead generation and qualification.
In short, running effective and quality content marketing campaigns allows you to achieve any goal you need, without spending resources on short-term strategies or costly advertising.
What does a content agency do?
A content agency, also known as a content marketing agency, provides business-quality content and effective strategy professionally. These agencies are full-service partners that provide strong content-related marketing services and products focused on enhancing online presence.
For businesses that don't have a lot of time or the skills to write attractive content, content agencies are indispensable. These agencies have experts who can provide support and advice on the development of content that includes the blog posts, social media posts, and website content that we mentioned above. They create and implement these contents according to the demands and expectations of the contracted company.
A business must continually produce and publish content to stay relevant. A quality content agency can continue to meet all your needs related to creating high-quality content.