Content marketing involves sharing any material online, such as videos, infographics, and social media posts, that don’t directly promote a brand but create awareness and enhance visibility regarding the products and services of a company, also known as owned content.
Using content marketing for PR is a modern way of owning your reputation and it is an important strategy to attract and engage a targeted audience by making a brand seem more relevant through articles, blogs, podcasts, videos, and other media. Content marketing ensures that a company establishes its expertise and credibility while also promoting awareness about the brand so that when a potential consumer wants to buy a specific service or product, that particular company is at the forefront of their mind.
Owned content is a key strategy for fast-growing brands. No matter how small or large scaled a company is, or whether a consumer brand or a B2B company, keeping its content marketing game updated and effective is the key to attracting and engaging more customers for their business. In this beginner’s guide, you will learn how to create a compelling and successful content marketing strategy for your brand to reach your targeted audience and boost your sales.
What Do You Mean by Content Marketing?
Content marketing focuses on boosting trust in companies’ relationships with their followers. By distributing various content creatively, content marketing ensures that a company attracts more customers, retains the existing ones, and builds loyalty and trust among its audience so that a brand can appear authoritative and influential.
So what exactly is content marketing? It produces and distributes valuable and relevant content like articles, blogs, social media posts, emails, newsletters, videos, and other media forms to attract existing and new customers.
When a company has mastered its game of content marketing, there’s no stopping it from generating profits from positive customer actions.
Content marketing is composed of two elements. First is content creation; pieces of written, spoken, or visually described materials that are engaging and convey a company’s goals to the right people. The second is content distribution. This part of content marketing concerns sharing strategic content through websites, emails, and social media.
Different companies have different content marketing strategies. Some famous companies like Spotify, Airbnb, Slack, and Wendy’s have social media teams that plan strategically to promote their content to customers and interact with them. Other organizations, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, etc., use B2B white papers for marketing purposes.
New industry and technology trends also influence content marketing plans. But as long as a company knows its core messages and ideas and how to create material that people will receive positively, it can adapt and evolve its marketing strategies accordingly.
In short, here are some ways in which successful content marketing can help a company or business;
- Improves your reputation in a consistent manner.
- Increases brand visibility and allows the company message to reach the right audience.
- Promotes a brand organically and naturally.
- Attracts potential new customers and engages existing customers.
- Increase conversions and boost revenues,
- Establishes a company as an industry leader.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing for PR?
PR is the management of your reputation, and owned content is your calling card. Consistent and high-quality content marketing is essential for companies to connect with their audience and to develop trust and reliability in their relationship.
Future Market Insights expects the US’s content creation market to grow with a CAGR of approximately 11.9%. Content creation and distribution have now become a top priority of the marketing department of every company and business, as there are many reasons why a consistent and engaging content marketing strategy can enhance the growth and success of a business.
Creates a Positive User Experience
Successful content marketing ensures that new and existing customers are satisfied with the ideas and messages promoted by a company. If they find your content engaging, unique, positive, and beneficial for them, they will come back for more as your customers will start trusting your brand and find it reliable and authentic. This approach is again helpful to the company as it retains the old customers and approaches new customers with a positive brand impression.
Helps Brands Gain Popularity on Social Media
According to the Pew Research Center, around seven in ten people in America use social media to engage with news, share information and connect, and for entertainment purposes. Creating trendy content on social media will not only garner more brand awareness but also help increase conversions and promote the products and services of a company in a natural way.
Content Marketing Creates Trust Within the Audience
When a company answers a complaint or query presented by its customers, they create value and change the public’s perception of the brand. Best content marketing strategies ensure that the relevant content shows up at the right time and place, thus interacting positively with the customers who will realize that your company’s advice and recommendations are reliable and accurate.
Content Marketing Improves Conversions
Using blogs, videos, or newsletters to bring in traffic, including a CTA, which can guide the audience regarding their actions, are examples of different content marketing plans. When your audience receives the correct answer to their question, their positive response will influence your conversions. When people view your content, it is more likely that they will purchase a product or service from your website, thus generating better leads for a company’s sales team.
Content Marketing and SEO
The consistency and high quality of content marketing also ensure better search engine optimization for your company’s websites. Suppose your content is helping your business gain more brand awareness and build trust with its audience. In that case, the content will rank higher on search engine results, thus positioning the company as authoritative and reliable from the public’s viewpoint.
What Are the Different Kinds of Content Marketing?
Content marketing sometimes uses outbound and inbound marketing strategies to present their content to the target audience.
Inbound marketing feels more organic and natural as the content creates a narrative or tells a story that is relevant and engaging to the audience. Outbound marketing is less effective in creating a positive user experience than the audience usually likes a link that interrupts their content.
So what are the different types of content marketing?
1. Social Media Owned Media
Everyone should know the importance of the power of social media, especially when technology has become cheaper than ever and accessing news is faster and easier. Social media is essential in content marketing because it allows companies to reach a greater audience in less time and provides multiple opportunities to present content in various ways, like live streams, stories, photos, and videos. Many businesses invest lots of money to promote their brands through content creation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms.
2. Website Content Marketing
Website content marketing refers to the content you publish via web pages. Website content marketing is one of the best content marketing strategies as it can create a strong brand presence online, thus allowing it to rank higher in search engine results. This approach enhances brand visibility, ensuring that your company’s website and content pop up in the right places and in front of the right audience, thus generating better leads and conversions.
Blog content marketing uses blogs to engage potential customers by sharing a creative and relevant narrative that can achieve customer trust and loyalty. Blogs are regularly updated web pages on a website that contains content written in a conversational or informal style. Blogs can also include inbound or outbound links and social share buttons that can further contribute to promoting a website.
4. Digital Marketing / Infographic Content Marketing
Infographics are content that presents information or data through visual representations like charts or diagrams. Infographics display this information in a format that is easy to understand and uses short statements and words, clear images, and simple context to communicate a company’s message clearly and effectively. Infographics are a great form of content marketing to tone down a complex, research-intensive, or educational topic so that more audience members can understand it.
5. Podcasts as Content Marketing Strategy
Podcasts are digital audio files available as series, episodes, or installments so subscribers can listen to each audio when the host releases it.
The number of podcast listeners worldwide is increasing yearly, so many companies and businesses are now sharing their podcasts to share a topic of their choice with their desired audience. With the right creativity and content marketing strategies, podcasts can help brands communicate their expertise and thought leadership regarding a specific topic.
6. Paid Ad Promotion
Paid ad content allows companies to reach a broad audience and place themselves on social media, banners, loading pages, and sponsored content where they want to be seen by their customers. Another method of content marketing is a paid ad promotion, in which specific content is created and distributed for the advertising and advertisement of a brand. This method uses PPC ads, paid social content marketing campaigns, and sponsored placement of these ads.
7. Video Content Marketing
Videos are also important content to raise a brand’s profile online. Companies usually post videos on YouTube or social media platforms, but companies can also publish in the form of courses, webinars, or live videos.
Video content marketing helps companies boost conversions as audiences find videos more reliable and authentic. It means that if a company promotes its products and services through a tutorial and promotional videos, they allow its audience to learn more about its brand in depth.
What Are Some Impressive Examples of Content Marketing?
1. Alo
Alo is a luxury activewear brand that uses social media marketing strategies to generate sales and revenue for its products. When you look at their Instagram account, not only will you see the different Yoga products that the brand presents, but you will also notice that the brand tries to resonate with its audience by letting them know that they can not only wear their clothes in a gym studio but also while going for a walk in the park. They use top models like Gigi Hadid or Kendall Jenner to showcase their clothes while staying genuine and authentic by creating awareness about physical activeness and a Yoga community online.
2. Taco Bell
Taco Bell also uses clever social media content marketing strategies to target teenagers and adults aged 18 to 34. Their best content marketing approach is to reply with witty remarks and comebacks in response to customers’ feedback, especially on Twitter.
Taco Bell uses fun and engaging, and sometimes bold ideas to capture the attention of its new and existing customers. In this way, people are encouraged to try out their products and then leave feedback on their social media platforms, thus generating more visibility for the brand.
3. Spotify
Spotify uses data generated by millions of listeners on their apps to create their annual “wrapped” content marketing campaigns. It is a brilliant idea to use in-depth analysis of the songs and music that shape the lives of their consumers and then create a playlist for them that displays the most played songs of the year. This strategy is fun and engaging for Spotify’s users and gives artists a statistical examination of their year’s top songs.
Conclusion
Creating clever and unique content marketing campaigns can take time and effort, even for experienced digital marketers. However, with practice and creativity, any company can achieve successful content marketing and reach its targeted audience through different digital media channels.
