How to Use Content Marketing Effectively

Background

In his book, Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi explains content marketing this way. “Your customers don’t care about you, your product, or your services. They care about themselves, their wants, and their needs. Content marketing is about creating interesting information your customers are passionate about, so they actually pay attention to you.”

In The Digital Marketing Handbook, Robert Bly describes content marketing as “a type of

marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material such as videos, blogs, articles, and social media posts. It differs from other types of marketing such as response and brand marketing, in that it does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended instead to stimulate interest in a product or service by creating helpful, informative content designed to solve a problem”.

Another description of Content Marketing from the Content Marketing Institute is, “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—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action”.

When to Use It

Often, industrial buyers are looking for something very specific. In this case, mass marketing does not work. This requires a strategy that is more targeted and is niche-specific such as digital marketing. One aspect of digital marketing, content marketing, can address very specific subject matter without sounding like an advertisement. Content Marketing then can be targeted to very specific audience via market segmentation. This is the process of dividing a market of potential customers into groups, or segments, based on different characteristics and interests.

Common Content Types

Some common examples of content include website articles, mobile apps, mobile content, e-books, infographics, annual reports, research papers, and podcasts.

Distribution Considerations

Once you have created the content, you need to market it.

Some marketing suggestions might include

posting it to your website
promoting it on social media
targeting it to specific audiences via the use of search engines