Online Content Marketing – Beginner’s Guide

By Christy Bella

There’s no denying that these days, content marketing is one of the best ways of bringing awareness to your brand. However, keep in mind that to achieve success, you need to have the right content strategy, as well as tools that will help you in creating perfectly optimized content. It might take a while, but you will see the results of your marketing efforts in increased sales, traffic, as well as a higher position in the search engine. Who knows, maybe you’ll even end up on the first page?

However, before you get started, you need to learn some basics. You might think of theory as a boring part, but the truth is that without knowing what content marketing actually consists of, you won’t be able to get very far. That’s why we created this beginner’s guide to content marketing. So, without any further ado, let’s get started.

What is content marketing?

You might have heard somewhere the words ‘content marketing’, but do you know what they actually mean? According to the Content Marketing Institute, “content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

These days, content marketing is used by more brands than you can imagine – mainly because traditional marketing is not as effective as it used to be even a few years ago. Instead of trying to promote product intrusively, content marketing provides customers with relevant information that builds trust between them and the brand.

The foundation of a successful content marketing strategy is of high-quality content. However, we are only humans, so it’s understandable that sometimes the writer might be faced with a block, or they might not have the energy to look for information that they can base their content on. Thankfully, that’s what Content curation examples from Massimo Chieruzzi are here for. As Chieruzzi says in his article, apart from looking for resources, content curation “has a slew of other great benefits, including building great connections with other industry leaders and positioning yourself as a go-to source for the best news in your chosen topic.”

Types of content marketing

Online content marketing can have different forms. However, the most widely used ones are:

• blog posts – which is what you are currently reading.

• e-books – what differentiates from blog posts is their length, depth, and frequency of publication. Visitors of the website can usually download it after submitting some kind of a from, for example, with an email address.

• case studies – case studies are like an opportunity for the company to tell a story of someone who succeeded after collaborating with them or investing in their products. They can take different forms, some of which are included on this list, like e-books or podcasts.

• templates – by using templates as a form of your online content marketing, you are not only saving your customers time but also make them more likely to engage with your content in the future

• infographics – infographics are more pleasurable for the eye way of presenting data. Sharing a lot of data with the website’s audience can be quite overwhelming for them, however, infographics make it easy to understand, and a lot clearer.

• videos – videos are definitely more time-consuming and require more resources than other forms of online content marketing. However, if you are using them, the chances of your content being shared on other social media increases 40 times. Worth the time spent on them, if you ask us.

• podcasts – some people don’t like to read content every day. Instead, they prefer something that they will be able to enjoy while doing the regular chords, without the need to focus their attention on the screen.Podcasts help people from this kind of audience in finding your brand. If you know interesting people that would gladly be interviewed, then you should really consider focusing on this type of content marketing.

• social media – even though publishing content on your own website is important, you also should distribute it on other sides, and in particular, on social media like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. This will bring awareness to your business and will help in gaining new potential customers.

So now that you have an idea about what content marketing is and what are its most popular types, we can move on to why and how content marketing can be beneficial to you as a business owner.

How can using content marketing be beneficial to your company?

As it was already mentioned, content marketing is extremely important for companies trying to promote their products, and there are several reasons why. Those include:

• building trust in the company, and improving their reputation – a study has shown that 70% of customers believe that if a company is providing them with valuable, custom content, it’s because it wants to establish a good relationship with their customers.

• helping in improving your SEO – good SEO is crucial if you want your brand to be visible online. However, it can be difficult without high-quality content – especially since usually the first pages of search engines include websites like Amazon or eBay, which generate millions, if not billions, of traffic every month.

• being a cost-efficient way of gaining new leads – traditional marketing campaigns can be pretty expensive, costing anywhere between $5.000 and $250.000. According to DemandMetric, content marketing costs almost 2/3 less, and every dollar spent on it can bring in even three times more traffic leads than traditional marketing.

All this is just the tip of the iceberg – if we were to list all the benefits that content marketing brings to your company, this guide would probably three times longer – and that’s not the point.

The Bottom Line

Online marketing is, without a doubt, one of the most efficient ways of promoting your own business. Studies have shown that people are likely to purchase something from the brand if they got to know about it from an article, and not from a traditional ad or email marketing. What’s more, the industry is forecasted to be worth more than $410 billion by 2021.

So, if you weren’t sure whether content marketing is what you want to get involved in – think again. It will definitely be worth it, but the final decision is up to you. No matter what you decide – Good Luck!