What is Content Marketing?

Posted on April 21, 2009 by Linda Stacy

Perhaps content marketing can be summed up by simply saying “Give the people what they want.” People come online looking for information and solutions. Using content marketing to provide potential customers with the information they’re looking for is highly effective.

Content marketing can go by a lot of different names such as private media, branded content, customer media and so on, but they are all essentially content marketing. This is probably one of the best ways to make sure your marketing is being truly effective.

One definition of content marketing is: a technique of making and distributing valuable and relevant content to bring in a much defined target audience with the over all objective being the creation of sales. Basically this is a way to reaching out to your customers and potential customers in a way specifically designed to attract them to you and keep them coming back.

Content marketing is all done without overtly trying to sell a product; it is intended to educate and inform the customers. With typical marketing, the goal is to make a sale and the product or service is the main point of the approach. Content marketing is very different from this approach and has proven to be very effective.

The idea around content marketing is to deliver consistent and useful information to the customer. In return, they will reward the company with their business and, over time, their loyalty to the brand. This form of marketing creates a bond between the customer and the company. This bond is a very hard one to break and results in ongoing business over time and a loyal customer.

Traditional marketing is becoming less and less useful as customers are able to skip commercials or change the channel on the TV. Ads in papers and billboards are not interactive and provide no real help to the customer. Pop-ups on the Internet are another way advertisers try to market their products but this can be ineffective as more and more people use their pop-up blocking tools on their browsers to avoid these invasive marketing tactics.

Content marketing breaks the mold completely and as odd as it may seem, the customer is the one who searches out the information they need. Not only do they remember where they found what they needed, they remember who provided the useful information as well -and this is where the marketing comes in.

Potential customers will buy from a company they trust and feel has the same interests as they do. This is why providing helpful advice and information is so very important to this marketing strategy. Most of the time, the people reading information on a web page don’t realize they are being marketed to as they read the content.

Recent studies have shown 70-80% of people who were surveyed, felt more comfortable buying something from a company they trust. Content marketing builds trust, because the customer begins to look forward to your next content installment and may make decisions based on the information given.

Content Marketing
To learn more simply click the link to claim your free report, Content Marketing Explained: Why Your Business Needs Content.

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4 Comments For This Post

  1. atul chatterjee Says:

    Agreed a person will feel more comfortable buying from a trustworthy company. But then trust does not get built up by reading articles.
    Trust gets built by using the product itself, hearing about others experiences.
    If Lenovo writers a great series of articles on its laptop and HP writes a lousy series, then for a comparable product Lenovo is not going to pull in more sales. There are a whole lot of other factors.
    This presentation of Article Marketing is too simplistic.

  2. Linda Stacy Says:

    Hi atul. Thanks for the comments.

    I agree… content marketing certainly involves more than article marketing and trust is not going to be earned solely by writing articles. Content marketing should be another strategy in an overall marketing plan. No one strategy is the be all and end all.

    One blog post certainly can’t fully cover content marketing techniques, but I believe this is more than a simple presentation of article marketing. I think it gives readers a basic understanding of what content marketing is, and I hope it encourages further exploration of the topic.

  3. Pavers Styles Says:

    Content marketing is brilliant. It’s simple but effective. So many people neglect what the visitor and potentially customer wants and lack this style of marketing. If done correctly it can produce great results. It’s like anything in that if you know what your customer wants and keep up to their needs you can provide this for them and be miles ahead of the competition which is so important, especially in economic times such as these.

  4. Linda Stacy Says:

    David, you wrote, “So many people neglect what the visitor and potentially customer wants….”

    I think that’s one of the keys to what separates successful marketers from all the rest. If you don’t “”give them what they want” they just aren’t going to stick around or come back.

    Thanks for your comments.

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