What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Every great piece of content has a content mapping strategy behind it. Just writing a press release or a nice blog post simply isn’t enough. There has to be a strategy behind the content or else nobody is going to see it. Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are delivering information that makes your buyer more intelligent.

So, what kind of content should you be using in your content marketing efforts? Content Marketing covers everything from blog posts to tweets to press release generation. You need to have a strategic plan behind your content marketing to make sure you are generating the right content for the right audience. Here’s a list of content marketing techniques you can use.

Blogs – You must create blog posts that your target audience wants to read and you must blog often. This not only helps with creating customers and building loyalty, but it helps with search engine optimization (SEO).

Press Releases - Press releases are one of the oldest forms of content marketing and they also help with SEO. You need to be consistent in issuing press releases that are news worthy, say at least one per month. When you issue a press release over the news wire, you also need to push it out to various social media channels. Join LinkedIn Groups and add your press release to their Promotion Sections. Tweet about your release. Add it to Google+ and Facebook pages. Send your press releases directly to reporters that cover your beat. Also send it to “friends” of your business, which can be partners, industry analysts, and customers. Also make sure you have an online newsroom so your release is easy to find on your website.

Email Newsletters – Newsletters are a great form of marketing content that can communicate now only your business news, but can summarize customer case studies, detail industry issues, and promote events. Newsletters should be sent out monthly on a consistent basis. We use MailChimp to issue our email newsletters. MailChimp helps you design email newsletters, share them on social networks, send them to your mail list, and track your results.

Social Media – Posting to your social media channels is an effective way to engage in content marketing. Make sure your daily posts link back to your website so you build traffic to it. Remember that only 1 in 10 posts should be self-promoting. The other posts should address industry issues, customer news, new products, company news, events, etc. Make sure your posts engage with your audience, i.e. inviting them to comment or retweet. Have buttons on your homepage that connect to your various social media outlets so it is easy for site visitors to find them.

If you do these things you are well on your way to establishing an effective content marketing strategy that will boost your site in the search engines, engage with your audience, and generate leads for your business. 

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