A Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing

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Way back in 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King”. How right he was. As we witness life’s everyday migration into the digital sphere, this is truer than ever. The web is awash with multimedia content covering any topic imaginable and this development has opened up a whole new marketing channel for anyone ready to use it.

The correct content marketing strategy will reap quantitative and qualitative rewards. In terms of the concrete, you’ll likely see an increase in site traffic, improved SEO, and direct customer conversions. And the other major benefits – better brand awareness and credibility in your chosen niche, industry respect and customer trust- are hardly abstract.

Content marketing is particularly strong when it comes to lead generation (identifying potential customers). By one measure, content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as outbound marketing at 62% of the cost.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the strategy of using content (information, data, articles, software, videos, photographs, anything) towards typical marketing ends: gaining new customers, retaining old customers, building brand awareness, etc.

There’s a whole rafter of complex technical things to be aware of in this niche. In what follows, we cover the basics of content marketing and give you some simple starting points.

The Basics

It starts with an overarching vision: a strategy as opposed to tactics. As with any marketing campaign, you want to think about what your goal is, who your target audience is and how much ROI you can reasonably expect. Ultimately, this will influence the kind of content you decide to create.

If you know who you’re targeting and what you want them to do, it should be easy enough to create something to affect that. The idea with any content is to showcase your skillset and expertise, whether you’re a Teppanyaki restaurant or a landscape gardener.

Set Up a Blog

Sharing your expert knowledge via blog is one conventional starting point, but you should try to be unique as possible to reflect your unique value proposition. To set up a blog, visit ALT Agency – the web agency who specialize in website design; check out their site here. They will be able to design a website that will work for both mobile and desktop that your customers will love to visit due to its ease of use.

Multimedia

This is true at the level of form and content. Multi-media can be a neat way of creating sticky content that keeps people on your site and sends good signals to Google. One study recorded how even just posts with images can produce 650% the engagement of text-only posts.

As a Teppanyaki chef, you could publish regular YouTube video content on how to prepare one of your meals, embedding this on your site and sharing a booking link for your restaurant in the video description. Equally, as a landscape gardener, you could look to answer some common informational questions that people want to know, whether it’s how to deadhead rose bushes or grow herbs from clippings.

The Golden Rule

The golden rule of content marketing is to try to go where no one else has gone before. If there’s already some content out there that’s similar to yours, you either have to do it better, or take it in a different direction. The last is much the easier to achieve when you’re up against massive companies with deep pockets and a million-dollar content marketing budget.

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