What is Content Marketing?

Before the emergence of the internet, the distribution of content was a physical process which involved many complexities, machinery, people, and money. The birth of internet has simplified creating and reproducing content, making it more convenient and affordable for business communication.

With the growing relevance of content in the digital arena, even marketers could not resist using it for their good. This led to the development of content marketing. Content marketing focuses on creating and sharing content as a part of marketing strategy. The intent of content marketing is to non-intrusively promote a brand by sharing valuable content that attracts target audience's attention. Blogging, tutorials and video sharing are famous forms of content marketing. It is performed for search engine optimization activities too but is more widely used for branding.

What is content marketing?

In content marketing, businesses provide completely free entertaining or informative media-type content to prospects in exchange for their consent to get advertised. Sharing content that is useful to your audience is the essence of content marketing. Your content should showcase your expertise in the field and discuss something that creates value for the audience. Ultimately, the expertise that you display in your media content will provoke your prospects to buy your products or service.

For example: If you are a fashion designer you can do the following for content marketing:

• Share a blog about fashion trends
• Share videos about party styling
• Share a fashion design newsletter every month

How does it work?

In content marketing, promotion is never upfront, it is always secondary to user-oriented, meaningful and valuable content. You will definitely promote because it is a kind of “marketing” but promotion should be done relatively at a lower bandwidth. Although, it may seem absurd that you are sharing your knowledge and industry know-how for free, but it will have a positive effect on your brand-value, sales, and online traffic. Your audience will perceive you as a professional in your field and will be willing to buy from you. If your content is good, it will be shared aggressively and will increase your market penetration, reach and visibility. Marketable content should encourage your audience to comment, rate, vote, review, share, distribute and modify your content.

How to use content marketing effectively?

Content has been a part of marketing since its beginning. But in content marketing a business sells its products and services through content, the “content” is being marketed here and it is nothing less than a TV or print endorsement. Hence, you need to put a lot of efforts, market insights and research before broadcasting any type of content, so as to receive a welcoming response from the target audience.

You may be wondering about the ways that can help you in effectively using content marketing for promoting your business. Here you go, following are some mainstream content marketing skills that you should develop:

1) Write content for the prospect
For being successful in content marketing, it is important to understand what your prospects want. Your content must be built around prospect's interest and not around your business. Prospects do not care about your offerings and operations, they just care about themselves. You should take advantage of this fact and build engaging content on topics that are connected with your prospect's life and its problems, try to answer their queries through your posts.

2) Keep the intensity of promotion low
If you want your content to provide value to prospects write content about stuff that would benefit prospects and barely promoting your business. People like articles, blogs and videos that interest them, not promotional ads praising your brand. By providing prospects what they want, in 9 out of 10 posts, you will cultivate an engaged audience.

3)Be findable
So now that you know what content to produce and put on the web. Have you thought how are people going to find you? Categorize and arrange your content to make it easily searchable by users. Use your keywords and commonly used search terms of your industry in content for search indexing. Post content on popular websites related to your brand.

Now that you have learned the requisite skills, are you all set to try content marketing for your business?

ValueHits can help you in creating customer-driven compelling content for your niche that can help in driving web traffic, increasing sales and generating leads. We have successfully used content marketing for numerous clients and attained delighting results. We look at a business from different angles to find what works best for it. To know more about our content marketing service get in touch with us.