Content Marketing: Basics That Every Digital Marketer Should Know

You are on this page, which means content marketing has influenced you. Probably in more ways than you recognize. And it’s regardless of the medium or source that brought you here.

Let’s start by breaking Content Marketing into content and marketing to understand its influence and potential.

What’s Content in Content Marketing? 

The matter is anything that has mass and weight. Similarly, content is anything that has a message and format. The message is a piece of information. The format is the structure in which it provides the information.

If wall posters and hoarding are popular examples of content in traditional form of information exchange, memes and podcasts are among the modern-day examples of it.

Example of message:

• Click here
• No trespassing
• Wanted: dead or alive
• Next McDonald’s is at 20 minutes drive

Example of format:

• Text
• Image
• Audio
• Video
• Any combination of text, image, audio, and video

The way you utilize the message and the format defines content.

What’s Marketing? 

According to Oxford, the definition of marketing is “the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.”

Marketing is the act of influencing potential customer (or market) in order to benefit your business in terms of sales, pricing, popularity, and more. The modern version of marketing involves a series of strategies working in alignment to reach a common target. It requires thorough market research, customer behavior analysis, regular performance tracking, and possible optimizations in the process.

What’s Content Marketing?

Let’s add definitions of ‘content’ and ‘marketing’.

Content marketing is the utilization of content in a strategic way to promote and sell products or services, along with measurement, analysis, and optimization. It is a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to prompt profitable customer action.

Benefits of Regular Content Marketing

Content marketing aims to follow a strategic approach that can drive the desired results. Influencing the consumer’s mindset to inflict such actions involve a series of positives that content marketing is capable of delivering. Here are some of the benefits that your business gets with content marketing:

Brand Visibility

If you are doing content marketing right and across the right platforms, then the chances for your brand to earn visibility enhance exponentially. As you publish the content regularly on different platforms, you are more likely to reach the audience across the platform on which they consume information/ Eventually, it boosts your brand visibility.

Consistent Audience

As you post engaging content across different channels at the right frequency, your target group will remain interested in your business. As most of the internet-based content lives forever, your consistent efforts in marketing are likely to bring a consistent audience growth as well.

Build Trust and Relationship

With your content, your business gets the ability to present its belief – what solution they offer. Content marketing can work as a strong source of information retention by presenting the same information repeatedly, which helps in increasing trust and improve the relationship with possible clients.

Online Authority and Reputation

Social media, search engines, website blog, and review portals are some platforms where you can publish your content. Interestingly, these platforms can present a positive vibe for your business. Various online rating parameters, such as search engine ranks, domain authority, page authority, and service rating help in building a strong authority across the internet.

Traffic to Conversion Funnel

Content is the crucial source of supplying traffic to your marketing funnel. For instance, your blogs can help in informing the customer at the awareness stage and email at the decision stage can push them to pick your services.

Types of content marketing?

• Email
• Webpage – images, videos, and text
• Social media
• Press release
• Blogs
• Ebooks 
• Whitepaper

Read more about types of content here.

Some Amazing Brands at Content Marketing

• HubSpot
• McKinsey

Who Is Content Marketer?

Since content marketing isn’t only about curating content, the role of content marketer also goes beyond content marketing. The content marketer has to strategize the content marketing plan, which should include curation, distribution, and promotion – specified with deadlines.

As a marketer, they need to align the different pieces and formats of content for various buyer personas at various funnel stages. Along with that, the estimation of the budget allocations and its optimum utilization to ensure higher ROI on content marketing remains their responsibility.

A content marketer is often confused with a content writer for various reasons. However, their Key Responsibility Area (KRA) and Key Performance Area (KPA) considerably distinctive. Content writer is a part of content marketing.

– How is a Content Marketer Different From a Content Writer?

The key role of the content writer is to curate the textual content. As mentioned above, the textual content is just one format of content. Hence, content writing is a part of the content marketing process.

The role of the content marketer is to utilize various forms of content (including textual) in a strategic manner with the aim of enhancing business goals, such as branding, lead generation, and more.

Businesses often confuse a content marker with a content writer. However, the content marketer holds more responsibility for your business in terms of brand positioning, lead generation, and other marketing goals.