Content Marketing is the umbrella term for all marketing formats done in print, TV, radio and all forms of information media. The most popular medium nowadays is through the world wide web. The internet grants access to more than 1 billion users in the world every day. If you want to fight for visibility in the internet, where there is an endless expanse of advertising space, you need to optimize your marketing strategies.
When you use the internet, you are limited to using digital material such as text, articles, posters, webpages, images, videos and audios. Your job as an advertiser is to find the best combination of these for your business, increase their number of viewers in the web and share information as effectively as possible.
What is Effective Content Marketing?
Content marketing can actually be considered an art. It is not just about posting anything that promotes your products, services, information and other businesses. The game here is to create content that is highly interesting, educational or funny such that your viewers and readers will get to remember them. Outstanding posts propagate in the minds and word-of-mouth of viewers, and they themselves will share the content.
This is the “magic” of content marketing. The internet is full of sharing and social content sites that you can exploit to get free advertising. When people find your ads interesting and outstanding, they will share them with their friends – netting you free advertising and a greater number of prospective customers.
Goals of Marketing
Content marketers employ this strategy to obtain a variety of business goals. These goals may roughly include the increase of direct sales, lead generation and thought leadership. Marketing content is also a way of branding, where the advertisers make a solid identity and make the brand perpetuate in the mind of consumers. In other words, it is done to get new customers, retain existing customers and increase the visibility of the business.
Tips on Increasing your Marketing Efficiency through Content Engineering
Nowadays, there are people who specialize in “content engineering”. You can be the content engineer for your own business or you can hire a dedicated team for the task. The job entails the creation and optimization of different content such as interactive Flash media, videos, images and ads such that customers and prospects engage them.
You can further boost your marketing efficiency by using web analytics and 3rd party software. For example, you can survey how much time visitors spend in reading your webpages and ads. Which of the advertisement materials tend to be visited more often? Which locations and sites attract more visits to the ads? These are the questions that will help you to work on your strengths, and to identify and rectify your current marketing blind spots and weaknesses.
Combining Marketing Strategies
Of course, content marketing must go hand-in-hand with traditional marketing methods especially for internet-based marketing. For example, you can perform search engine optimization (SEO) on the text content and multimedia items on your website. SEO will increase your ranks in Google, Yahoo and search engines, allowing your content to receive more views for free.
Also make sure that your content is optimized towards certain keywords. For example, when you write promotional articles, optimize them with several relevant keywords. That way, they can still be searched in Google even if they are already distributed to different article databases.
Moreover, exploit the power of social media and social networking sites. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest etc. are highly capable marketing solutions that you can use for free. Imagine, you can create groups for quick correspondence and sharing of ads between you and customers. Content marketing also gets viral here because you can ask your friends to post the ads on their wall. In a matter of a few seconds, your content can be seen by thousands – even by those using mobile devices.
Call to Action
The “Call to Action” is a very important part when you are doing content marketing. Your ads may be outstanding in terms of presenting information and creativity but after that, the viewers may ask “now what?” You need to explicitly tell them what you want them to do. Include links that will refer them to the pages. These pages would then contain the products, services and information that you want them to have. Tell them to answer a survey or share the ads with friends. It has now become easier because social networking buttons like “Tweet” and “Like” can be embedded to ads.
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Article by Fred Owusu
+Fred Owusu is an Online Entrepreneur and founder of AttractionMarketingCafe. AttractionMarketingCafe's main objective is to help you achieve success in your online ventures. My philosophy is for you to pick one strategy and stick with it until you know the In’s and Out’s of that strategy. (Master it). Attract and become who you wish to become.
has written 89 awesome articles for us at Attraction Marketing Cafe
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: informedwc
October 19, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Great, comprehensive overview of content marketing, Fred. I’m going to link to it from my site. Would like to warn people that content strategists may give people the road map to how their business can come up with topics their ideal prospects will respond to, but the company usually needs to do the writing. That’s where SEO content writers come in!
Hello Suzanne,
Thank you for stopping by and I appreciate you linking to this article. really appreciate it. I am glad you like what I put up. See you soon.