Once a novelty niche in the marketing arena, content marketing is now its own branding powerhouse. If you have been put in charge of creating content for marketing your products and services, you already know how important marketing is to create sales and profits for your organization. What makes content marketing different from traditional marketing strategies? It lies in the way information is delivered and how directly or indirectly it aims at its targets.

• Content Marketing Basics
• Content Marketing Basics Tutorial
• Content Marketing Basics Concepts
• Content Marketing Basics Pdf
• Content Marketing Basics For Beginners

What exactly is content marketing? According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience…”

There are three key reasons for companies to use content marketing:

Content marketing is a technique used by companies and organizations to create and share valuable information that attracts and maintains a target audience. Content marketing focuses on ensuring that the target audience or customer acquires information that they find useful or valuable. Here is a basic guide to content marketing to help your small business grow online. What is Content Marketing? Content marketing is a huge part of the awareness/discovery funnel. Check this out: Source: aweber.com. It is a means of marketing or promoting your business in the most creative ways possible so your customers can find you. Content marketing is a completely different approach. It’s a long-term strategy focusing on relationships, authority, trust, and value. This is the second most important idea while we are talking about content marketing basics for beginners With a simple Google search, you are going to find dozens of different definitions for content.

1. Increased sales
2. Cost savings
3. Better customers who have more loyalty

Content marketing builds brand value by delivering valuable information that is not directly about the brand itself. By becoming an acknowledged source or expert for information, companies can create transparency and foster deeper connections with consumers that go far beyond goods and services.

However, while content marketing is a force in its own right, it is important to remember content marketing is not completely separate from your company’s overall marketing strategies.

It creates specialized content that can be used on different platforms including:

• Social media marketing
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• Public Relations strategies
• PPC – Pay-per-Click, such as search engine advertising
• Content strategy

Before you can use content marketing as an effective tool to drive profits, first you must develop a content marketing strategy.

Here are seven easy steps to develop or revamp your content marketing plan:

1. Determine the objectives of your content marketing plan. Ask yourself why you need this and what you expect your outcomes to be.
2. What makes your plan unique? What will set you apart from the competition?
3. Use metrics based on your objectives. Measure what you have defined as the reason for your content marketing plan.
4. Define your target audience. Keep in mind what you think is not necessarily what your audience will think.
5. Research your targets. You can use social media, search engines, conversations with customers, feedback, surveys and input from coworkers to create relevant content.
6. Use your target personas to understand how, when and where your audience uses information. Create a flexible strategy that changes daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly.
7. Amplify your content using social media. Customers help by sending your content to others to boost your online presence.

With a content marketing plan in place, what are some of the do’s and don’ts that can enhance the plan or stop it in its tracks?

Let’s start with the Do’s:

1. Focus on Why, Who, What, Where, When and How. Start with why. Why are you doing this? Is it to establish a brand? Improve customer service? Get data for market research? Once you understand your reasons, you can move on to determining your target audience and what they need. Remember, the content should serve not only your customers, but also your company.
2. Keep things interesting. Boring content that doesn’t invite engagement or feedback will soon be ignored.
3. Find your target audience. Tailoring content for this group will keep you from trying to be all things to all people.
4. Be original. Find ways to bring your products or services to your target audience in new and innovative ways using a different style and fresh ideas.
5. Keep content short and interesting. Use bullets, lists and ideas to give instant gratification.

Now let’s look at the Don’ts:

1. Try to sell your product with a hard approach. The overt purpose of content marketing is to provide interesting and thought-provoking material that is possibly adjacent to your product or services but not directly related, so customers will want to know more about your product and seek you out.
2. Promote advertisements about your company.
3. Be a copycat. Look for new ideas and try them out.
4. Focus solely on your company. You can relate articles or blogs to your company indirectly but use intriguing materials to bring the customers to you.
5. Use complex, difficult to use social media and websites.

Content Marketing Basics

Being in charge of content marketing is not an easy job in an increasingly competitive technological landscape where every entity is crying out for the consumer’s attention. Relying solely on technology or imitation will not bring you the results you want. The bottom line is to focus on your customers and addressing their informational needs beyond your specific product or services in an innovative way to bring them to you again and again.

Content Marketing Basics Tutorial

With its roots dating as far back as the late 19th century, content marketing’s first appearance was considered insignificant. The first business ever to use this marketing method was The Furrow, a magazine that published an edition that featured advice for farmers on how to grow their business.

This quickly caught the attention of marketers with a sharp eye for opportunity, and the same method of content marketing was used not long after by French tire company Michelin. The company used the same method to publish a 400-page document that contained advice for road travel and auto-maintenance. Their publication proved to be a huge success, and since then, businesses have been following this marketing model for years.

You might be wondering:

“What made it so successful?”

Here’s the deal:

Content Marketing Basics Concepts

The reason why content marketing gained such popularity was that it provided a way for businesses to connect with their target audience. It opened a doorway for marketers to gather reviews and engage with the people they were creating the content for. As a result, it helped their businesses use customer feedback to grow and improve in the long run.

Content Marketing Basics Pdf

What many consider to be the greatest leap in content marketing’s journey to becoming the number one advertisement and promotion method in the world happened with the rise of the internet and social media.

Many things have changed over the years. Research and statistics started focusing more on how this marketing method provided the skyrocketing results it did. And now, we are going to go through every single fact, tip, and bit of information we have on what makes this new era approach to marketing so special.

Content Marketing Basics For Beginners

We suggest you take a look at the infographic below and learn more about content marketing basics.