For many bloggers and content marketers, content is the backbone of their businesses. Whether they are creating in-depth guides for potential customers, testing and reviewing products, or just posting about daily life, content is constantly flowing through online publications. But what is content marketing? What does it mean to write compelling content for digital marketing purposes? Let's explore the differences between online and traditional forms of content marketing, the pros, and the cons of each.
The Basics
If you're reading this, I assume you already have a general idea of what content marketing is. For those of you who need a refresher, content marketing can be described as the process of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers through marketing content.
Traditional marketing, which is sometimes considered to be part of content marketing , is essentially advertising that users have no interest in apart from what the adverts offers. While traditional marketing is still extremely relevant, it's important to understand the differences between the two.
On one hand, you have adverts that appear in the form of billboards, TV commercials, and magazine spreads. These are all examples of traditional marketing, and the main purpose of the content involved is to attract users to a product or service, with the aim of ultimately selling a product or service to them.
On the other hand, content marketing is focused on creating value for users through engaging content that provides valuable information or allows users to feel like they've learned something new.
The Evolution Of Content Marketing
Content marketing has evolved over time to become a highly effective form of digital marketing. The shift to digital and online content for marketing is almost ubiquitous, with almost all traditional marketing methods transforming to some degree into content marketing. Newer forms of content marketing, including video content marketing and podcasting, are also gaining a lot of popularity.
The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has also enabled businesses to become much more data-driven and precise, leading to a rise in the number of people using big data and analytics to inform content marketing decisions.
So what has changed? How has content marketing evolved to fit into its current form?
In the beginning, simply creating content to attract potential customers was sufficient. As long as you could create enough good quality content to make people click-through to your site, you could probably pull in the traffic you need to grow your business.
As content marketing evolved, so did the expectations of the industry. People started looking for more from content creators. Consumers began to expect more from content marketers. In fact, one of the 2016 SMART goals set by the marketers surveyed was to increase the engagement between content/marketers and consumers.
First and foremost, consumers want to feel that they're getting something of value. When marketers can prove that they've provided consumers with content that is both high quality and interesting, they'll be able to attract and retain customers.
Attracting And Engaging An Audience
When a user comes to your site from an advert, they're generally there with a purpose – to do something. Whether they want to buy a product or service, or they just want entertainment, you can assume that the most effective way to attract and engage them is by providing them with content that fits their needs.
According to HubSpot Blogs research, people come to blogs to learn something new.
In other words, if you want to know what makes a hot sauce recipe successful, you'll likely find that many of the popular ones focus on providing valuable information rather than just showing you how to make a certain kind of food.
You can also use your content to raise awareness of a certain cause or issue, such as environmental concerns or raising mental health awareness. When done well, content can work hard to drive sales while also engaging an audience and raising awareness of a social cause.
If your product is relatively easy to use or requires no previous experience to operate, you can also use your content to provide instructional videos, how-to guides, or social media tutorials. In short, if you're able to provide useful information that people want to learn or know, you're able to draw a significant audience to your site.
The Importance Of Relevance
It's no secret that content is constantly being created and published online. If you've ever tried to search for a topic or product on a website, you'll quickly find that thousands of blogs, websites, and social media accounts cover your search topic, with sometimes hundreds of articles being published each day.
With so much content being produced, the battle for attention becomes ever more important, and much more competitive.
What does this mean for content marketers and businesses? It means that your content needs to be both useful and relevant to your target audience. In other words, you need to ensure that both your writing and your videos provide value and are pitched at the right level.
Traditional Versus Digital
Whether you're creating a blog post for your website, or you're publishing content to social media accounts, the most effective way to ensure that your content provides value and is relevant to your target audience is to test it.
Traditional forms of advertising, such as TV commercials and billboards, are extremely susceptible to tests. If you have a limited budget for advertising, you can run small tests to see how your commercial or billboard fares. Once you've determined the results of your test, you can decide whether to continue with the advert or billboard campaign, or try something new.
Similarly, if you're running an online store, you can use tools like Google Analytics to see how effective various marketing campaigns are when it comes to driving traffic to your website. You can also use tools like Hootsuite to see what content performs best on social media, and optimize future content towards these platforms.
As you'll discover below, content marketing is a broad term that covers many different areas. If you're not sure where to start, feel free to reach out. We're happy to help you identify the perfect fit for your business.