TL;DR
- Content marketing is blogs, emails, pictures, videos & more
- Content marketing starts with content auditing & strategy
- Great content is the key to successful content marketing
What the heck is content marketing? In this information age, content marketing is what’s required for many companies to shine. Content marketing is the practice of planning, producing, and distributing all types of creative assets on the internet.
Content marketing can also take a physical form, but when’s the last time you read a magazine? The main objective of content marketing is to remove all friction from a buyer’s journey.
You likely have many questions about content marketing, and that’s pretty neat. Keep scrolling to learn everything you want to know about content marketing in 2023.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is marketing that uses one or many types of content to educate, engage, and inspire potential and actual customers. At the core of any successful content marketing strategy is great content.
Content marketing can produce results that matter when the content is aligned with key business objectives. Content marketing takes many forms, for example—
- Creating memorable and engaging social media posts that grab attention
- Developing a high-value anchor asset and repurposing it in many ways over time
- Optimizing an organization’s digital presence to rank highly in search
- Creating more and better technical content to retain users more effectively
Content marketing produces most of what you consume on the internet—this masterpiece included! 😂 Your customers’ time matters—a lot—and that’s why your marketing content needs to be consistently excellent.
How does content marketing work?
A content marketing effort may be structured as a series of campaigns that support long-term business priorities. If you’re looking for the basic steps to create and execute a content marketing strategy, then check this out—
1- Conduct a content audit: Your first step is to conduct a content audit to assess the strengths and weaknesses of any existing content.
2- Create a content strategy: You can use the audit results to help create a content strategy that maps to the most important business goals.
3- Find resources: Procure the necessary resources—mainly humans, money, and time—to execute your content strategy.
4- Create content: Have fun creating great content in the formats identified as priorities by your content strategy.
5- Publish content: Publish your content using the schedule specified by your content strategy.
6- Measure content performance: Collect data on a regular basis to learn how your content is performing.
7- Analyze the data: Evaluate the relevant data to spot trends, areas for improvement, and core strengths.
8- Optimize your content: Use the results of your analysis to improve your content to better meet customer needs.
9- Refresh the content: Refresh your content on a regular basis to maintain its relevancy and rank in search.
10- Manage all the content: Use project management strategies to organize and maintain your growing mountain of content.
11- Refresh your strategy: Reevaluate your content marketing strategy on a routine basis to ensure that it’s meeting your most important business and customer needs.
Pros and cons of content marketing
Content marketing can enable organizations to meet many different business goals, which is pretty awesome. But content marketing can have some drawbacks, too, which are important for any organization to understand.
Let’s dive deep into all the pros and cons of content marketing.
What to love about content marketing
- High ROI potential: Content marketing done well can be among the most profitable ways to market a company. Choosing content types with high ROIs—like blogs and newsletters—can maximize the profit potential of your content strategy.
- Customized and adaptive: Content marketing initiatives can be highly customized to address an organization’s unique business challenges. Content marketing strategies can evolve over time as preferences and needs change for all stakeholders.
- Creative yet valuable: The best marketing content is a joy to consume. Content marketing at the exact intersection of art and business captures the best of both worlds.
How content marketing can do better
- Time to positive ROI: What’s the fastest way to boost sales performance using digital marketing? Probably via paid advertising. Content marketing can require 3-6 months before your investment return becomes positive.
- Accuracy of measurement: Measuring the ROI of a content marketing campaign or strategy is notoriously difficult. The formula to measure content ROI has many variables, and external factors—like search algorithm updates—can skew performance data.
- Total duration: The other bad news about content marketing is that you may always need it. Your organization will likely always have goals, customers will continue to have demands, and you can typically use content marketing to satisfy these requirements.
The hardest part of content marketing is usually getting started. A content marketing strategy set in motion can begin to meet urgent stakeholder needs, generate useful data, and produce positive ROI over time.
Examples of great content marketing
Content marketing can take so many different forms—some examples of content marketing assets include whitepapers, blogs, videos, newsletters, podcasts, and infographics. Let’s get some more clarity by focusing on four specific examples of content marketing done exceptionally well—
- Consensys Signal: This email newsletter is published by the leading Ethereum software company. It’s jam packed with useful information but phrases like “yes, you may need a blockchain” make it fun to read, too.
- Celsius Network: The (now defunct 🤦♀️) digital asset lending platform stands out for creating an explainer video on “blockchain banking” that uses storytelling to be memorable. The animated style of the video further engages anyone who loves cuddly teddy bears.
- Dogecoin: The ultimate meme coin not surprisingly has an engaging website. Dogecoin.com is informative while staying fully in character—visitors to the homepage are greeted with announcements like “Such core wallet 1.14.6 released! Much upgrade, plz!” The infamous style of Dogecoin is key to the vibrancy of this community.
How to get started with content marketing
Are you curious about how to begin your content marketing journey? Getting started with content marketing usually requires making several key decisions to guide your efforts. Here are some key questions to ask—
- Who will plan your content marketing strategy? You can plan your own content strategy, hire an in-house professional, or work with a content marketing consultant or agency.
- Who will execute your content plan? Same deal here—You can choose to execute the entire content plan yourself, hire freelance writers and creators, or outsource to a consultant or agency.
- How will you pay for content marketing? Finding a way to afford content marketing usually means making a business case or allocating part of an existing marketing budget.
- Are you prepared to succeed at content marketing? Succeeding at content marketing means continuing to produce great content over a long time horizon. It’s smart to ponder if you feel prepared for this commitment.
Is content marketing right for you?
You may still be wondering if you need content marketing or if it’s worth the expense. That’s understandable. The high ROIs of successful content marketing make the option attractive to many people 🙋♀️ with marketing objectives. Content marketing dates back to Ben Franklin and the Old Farmer’s Almanack, yet still forms the core of many modern marketing strategies and campaigns. You may not need content marketing, but your target customers do.
