Know what content marketing is?

According to Wikipedia, it is a tool that encompasses “all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to attract, acquire and engage clearly defined and understood current and potential consumer bases with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

In other words, when it comes to social media content marketing includes all the types of information, stories, updates, links, photos and videos you choose to create and/or distribute to your fans and followers on various online networks in order to engage with them and to ultimately drive sales or induce any other desired action. However, don’t confuse this with selling. Content is about providing your customers with interesting information, often not about your products or services.

Why do you need content marketing?

Traditional marketing techniques, including advertising and sales pitches, are no longer as effective; consumers nowadays prefer to be engaged and offered valuable, helpful or fun stories. And this is where the strength of content marketing lies.

You can’t just share anything you find online, you need an effective content marketing strategy that can speed up the decision-making process of consumers and so to help you generate sales.

What’s most important though is that to tell stories that are truly effective in attracting and keeping customers you can’t just share anything you find online, you need an effective content marketing strategy that can speed up the decision-making process of consumers and so to help you generate sales.

To give you some numbers, a new research by Econsultancy found that 90% of surveyed brands believe that content marketing will become more important over the next 12 months and 73% of respondents agree that ‘brands are becoming publishers.’ However, only about 38% have an established content marketing strategy; still 55% are planning to develop one.

So, what should the strategy include?

It should identify the types of content (photos, videos, articles) and content topics (e.g. health advice and tips if you’re fitness studio for example) that would work best for your audience, including defining the appropriate channels to share this information as well as the optimum timings to post online for each network.

Content marketing is an art of communication and telling engaging stories is a skill. For SMEs it is often best to leave it to the professionals who have plenty of experience and can understand a specific audience better to shape up the most persuasive content that can drive desired calls-to-action.

Image Credit: Hugo90