If you have a website or blog, I’m sure you have heard of content marketing. It’s the hot new buzzword these days and the solution for all your marketing problems, or at least it seems. You may be wondering what exactly content marketing is. Over the course of the next 30 days and blog posts, I’ll walk you through all the details of not only what it is, but more importantly what you can do to use content to market your business, your products, and your services. We get into the “how to” details and I have plenty of strategies you can try for yourself.
First though, let’s talk about what exactly content marketing is and why it is so crucial these days for your internet marketing success. It doesn’t matter if you have an online or offline business. People use the internet more than anything else to find information and to find you. The days of yellow page ads and flyers or ads in the local paper are gone. The best way to make sure you are easy to find is to have plenty of content out there to do the marketing and selling for you.
Online content can come in a variety of different formats. There is written content, audio and video content, and even images, infographics and the like. They are all great bits and pieces that can be used in your overall marketing strategy. To market with content, simply means that you use those informational and educational pieces of content to promote your website and what you have to offer.
The idea is that other people will find your content, read it, watch it, or listen to it, and learn from it. This helps them to get to know you and most importantly, it helps to build trust and build that relationship that gets them comfortable to do business with you.
As with any other advertising and marketing method, the idea is to get out there in front of people who are interested in what you have to offer. That means your blog or website isn’t the only place where you use content marketing. It may also include posting on Facebook, tweeting regularly, creating content on LinkedIn, or recording educational videos to share on YouTube.
It means creating keyword based content so you can be found on Google, but also other platforms that we don’t necessarily think of as search engines like Pinterest and again YouTube which is now the number two search platform.