Content Marketing Basics

Introduction to content marketing

As traditional marketing is becoming less and less effective, you’re probably thinking about the best better way.

Here comes content marketing.

Content marketing is the marketing method of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly targeted audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

The keyword here is “valuable” and it’s what changes the whole definition from something that could describe almost any other form of advertising or marketing method.


Bill Gates, is his essay “Content is the King”, back in 1996, explains the purpose of content in the modern world, and how the internet is going to change the way we create, publish, distribute and consume content.
He sees the internet as a medium, which was something very new and different back then, he sees the revolution internet was bringing to people, on how they get information and communicate.
And this was just an introduction to what was going to happen in the following years. With the spread on the internet all over the world, the content came as one way to reach online users, to attract, interact and sell. It started with websites presenting their business with a few web pages. Then the more dynamic pages came up.

Today, it’s required from website owners to be active, to keep posting new information and fresh content. This is why many sites have a blog. A blog is a way to keep this dynamic approach, to be more active and to keep posting fresh content regularly. The benefits are numerous, from gaining traffic to expand reach through social media distribution and getting new leads too.

As the content has found its purpose in all the parts of online marketing, developing a content marketing strategy is an essential task and it’s something that needs to be managed very carefully with always keeping the right goals in mind.

Let’s check out the Basics!

What is content marketing?
Content is the information, it can be an idea, an experience or some facts you publish online. It’s anything that you produce and publish in order to offer it to your audience. Most of the time, content comes in text form, but it can also be visual, audio or video.


In the field of the digital world, content should have the following qualities:

• Useful
• Easy to consume
• Shareable
• Original
• Relevant
• Compelling
• Evergreen
• Personalized
• Authentic
• Engaging
• Educational
• Entertaining
• Insightful
• Conveying a story
• Contextual


In business promotion, content is used as a way to directly connect with your target group. Each of these qualities is supposed to increase your content quality, you present to your potential customers. While the main purpose is to encourage their interest in your brand or business through this content.

What is content marketing? 

Content marketing is a type of marketing focused on the creation and distribution of online goods that directly or indirectly promote the brand.
Direct promotion associates with the creation of promotional materials and content for advertising purposes. This type is usually used in paid ads or affiliate links.
On the other hand, content marketing is generally void of any direct promotion. The purpose of this sort of content is to increase interest in your products or services. This way, indirect content marketing attracts leads and customers.

The essentials of content marketing

In business, you don’t create content randomly. It’s not only about writing about what you love, personally enjoy (it really helps if you love something and are passionate about it) or about viral posts, everyone is talking about.
In content marketing, you don’t write whatever comes to your mind though. You need to think very well before you’ll start writing

Content creation is so much more than having an idea about a specific topic. It’s a well-planned strategy that’s supposed to give your business certain results, which suggests that you have to think about all the features that can help you create the content that brings you to your goal. Starting from the target audience, to the SEO… Here you’ll find the aspects you need to consider.

Audience 
The user experience, in terms of content, translates into “attention to the target audience”, which means that you have to have your audience in mind when you create content. After all, the content is the users primarily. Despite the type of content or the distribution methods you’re going to use, your content needs to resonate with your target group. That said, you should think about the following characteristics:

• Determine your target group
• Think about their possible questions, problems, dilemmas, etc.
• Be able to predict what kind of information can help in these situations
• Write content that is relevant to your target group
• Use the language your target group can identify with

Niche 
In marketing, a niche refers to a concentrated topic that meets the interests of your target group, as well as to the products or services you’re selling. It’s the topic you want to focus on, having the intention to specialize in and become a sort of expert. Choosing your niche helps you to focus on a narrow subject, which helps you determine the road for your content marketing strategy.

Resources
This is the next step you need to take. The resources are necessary for content marketing strategy,  and they need to be assigned to content creation like on any other strategy.

Competitors
Even though being unique is essential for content creations, it never hurts to check out what your competitors are doing. That’s how you keep up with the trends.

SEO 
Search engine optimization’s major task is content optimization. The main purpose is to attract search engine crawlers and get the content indexed. This process increases the visibility of the content and helps the increase of website ranking in the search engine results.