Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a targeted audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action. Instead of directly promoting a brand, product, or service, content marketing aims to provide useful information, entertain, educate, or inspire the audience.
Content marketing can take various forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, social media posts, infographics, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, and more. The key is to produce content that resonates with your target audience’s interests, challenges, and needs, thereby building trust and credibility with them over time.
Effective content marketing involves understanding your audience, defining clear objectives, creating high-quality content tailored to your audience’s preferences, and distributing it through the appropriate channels. It’s also important to measure the performance of your content marketing efforts through metrics such as website traffic, engagement, lead generation, and conversion rates, and adjust your strategy accordingly to achieve your goals.
Implications
The rise of content marketing has turned many traditional businesses into media publishing companies.
For example:
Red Bull, which sells a high-energy beverage, has published YouTube videos, hosted experiences, and sponsored events around extreme sports and activities like mountain biking, BMX, motocross, snowboarding, skateboarding, cliff-diving, freestyle motocross, and Formula 1 racing. Red Bull Media House is a unit of Red Bull that “produces full-length feature films for cinema and downstream channels (DVD, VOD, TV). The Red Bulletin is an international monthly magazine Red Bull publishes with a focus on men’s sports, culture, and lifestyle.
The personal finance site Mint.com used content marketing, specifically their personal finance blog MintLife, to build an audience for a product they planned to sell. According to entrepreneur Sachin Rekhi, Mint.com concentrated on building the audience for MintLife “independent of the eventual Mint.com product. Content on the blog included how-to guides on paying for college, saving for a house, and getting out of debt. Other popular content included in-depth interviews and a series of financial disasters called “Trainwreck Tuesdays.” The popularity of the site surged as did demand for the product. “Mint grew quickly enough to sell to Intuit for $170 million after three years in business. By 2013, the tool reached 10 million users, many of whom trusted Mint to handle their sensitive banking information because of the blog’s smart, helpful content.
The rise of content marketing has also accelerated the growth of online platforms, such as YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Pinterest, and more.
For example:
YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is an online video platform driving (and benefiting from) the surge to content marketing. As of 2016, YouTube had over 1 billion users, representing 1/3 of all internet users and reaching more people 18–34 years of age than any cable provider in the U.S.
· Yelp, an online business directory, has seen 30% year over growth in the number of reviews, ending the second quarter of 2016 with 108 million reviews for over 3 million businesses.
Businesses actively curate their content on these platforms with hopes to expand their reach to new audiences.
Part of transitioning to a media publishing mindset requires a change in structure and process to create content at “the speed of culture.” Marketing content production is transforming from an advertising agency model to a newsroom model, according to one consultant.
Common metrics
Metrics to determine the success of content marketing are often tied to the original goals of the campaign.
For example, for each of these goals, a content marketer may measure the different engagement and conversion metrics:
Brand awareness and visibility
Businesses focused on expanding their reach to more customers will want to pay attention to the increase in the volume of visitors, as well as the quality of those interactions. Traditional measures of volume include the number of visitors to a page and number of emails collected, while time spent on page and click-through to other pages/ photos are good indicators for engagement.
· Number of visitors to a page
· Time spent on the page
· Click-through across pages/ photos
· Number of emails collected
Brand health metrics
Businesses want to measure the impact that their messages have on consumers. Brand health refers to the positive or negative feedback that a company gets. It also measures how important a brand is for consumers. With this companies want to find out if brand reputation influences their customers to make a purchase.
Measures in this part comprise
· Share of voice (SOV) is the number of times a brand has been talked versus its competitors (conversations). Outside the digital world, SOV stands for the space and frequency a brand advertisement is placed on traditional media.
· Sentiment is when the brand has positive, negative or neutral feedback.
· Brand Influence refers to the number of times a post, comment or tweet is shared on different platforms.
Diversified user base
For businesses hoping to reach not only more — but also new — types of customers online, they should pay attention to the demographics of new visitors, as evidenced by cookies that can be installed, different sources of traffic, different online behaviors, and/or different buying habits of online visitors.
· Demographics of visitors (i.e., age, gender, location, income, interests, device preference, etc.)
· Sources of traffic (i.e., SEO, social media, referral, direct)
· Differences in buying patterns and user-behavior of visitors
Sales
Businesses focused on increasing sales through content marketing should look at traditional e-commerce metrics including click-through-rate from a product-page to check-out and completion rates at the check-out. Altogether, these form a conversion funnel. Moreover, to better understand customers’ buying habits, they should look at other engagement metrics like time spent per page, number of product-page visits per user, and re-engagement.
· Conversion through the sales process (the process from sign-up to check-out), including click-through-rates at each stage of the conversion funnel
· Time spent on the page
· Re-engagement (i.e., % of returning visitors)
· Click-through across product pages
The Content is Written by Rajat Sharma
