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.
The four
steps of the buying cycle with content marketing:
Awareness.
Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is
a solution.
Research.
Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to
educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what
different types of cars exist, and which one will fit their needs.
Consideration.
At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different
vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
Buy.
Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the
transaction.
Traditional
advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps.
Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by
raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may
have never considered before.
(from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/)
Great
Content
If you’ve
ever slogged your way through reading a piece of marketing and only finished
reading because you had to, then you’ve experienced bad content marketing. When
I speak to companies about content marketing I tell them that content is good
if they genuinely want to read it. Content is great if they’re willing to pay
to read it. If you want to see great examples of content, just look at what
you’ve paid to read, watch, or listen to lately. If you watched The Lego Movie
this year, you saw one of the greatest examples of content marketing to date.
Oh, you thought they made that movie in order to sell movie tickets? Think
again. That was a 100 minute toy commercial, and rather than using a DVR to
skip it you paid good money to watch it. Is it any coincidence that Lego
recently leapfrogged Mattel, the creators of Barbie, to become the largest toy
company in the world? You may not have the budget to make a feature film to
promote your company, but you can still give potential customers valuable
information.
The #1
Secret of Content Marketing
Add value.
That’s the secret. It’s not really a secret at all. We’ve already talked about
it throughout this piece. Although when you look at some of the marketing
companies engage in you wonder if they’re purposely avoiding the obvious. We
skip advertising when it provides little to no value. If you want to learn
about advertising that doesn’t get skipped, find a skateboarder and ask him if
you can watch him look through a skateboard magazine. You’ll see that he spends
as much time looking at the ads as he does looking at the articles and photos.
Or check out The Berrics website. Much of the content is advertisements, but
skaters don’t skip these videos, they watch them just like they watch the other
videos, because they’re getting the value they want–good skating. As a skater
I’d like to say skateboard companies pioneered content marketing decades ago,
but I know they were only doing what came naturally, and selling more product
was secondary to the fun of creating videos and magazines. If you want to hire
someone onto your marketing team who understands content marketing intuitively,
hiring a skateboarder might not be a bad step.
(from http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/09/19/what-is-content-marketing/)
