Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. It can boost factors like brand awareness, sales, reach, interactions, and loyalty.
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Content marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. It helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.
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Content marketing is different than traditional product-marketing efforts like sales collateral and other product-specific info. It starts with identifying the customer's needs. Content marketing includes things like educational articles, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions people have and provide them with something they can’t get elsewhere.
Types of Content Marketing
1. Social Media Content Marketing
2. Infographic Content Marketing
3. Blog Content Marketing
4. Podcast Content Marketing
5. Video Content Marketing
6. Paid Ad Content Marketing
Why Content Marketing?
Perhaps more important than understand what content marketing is, is understanding why content marketing is important to your business. First we need to understand the four steps of the buying cycle:
Awareness. Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution.
Research. Once a customer is aware there is a solution, they will perform research to educate themselves. For example, a car buyer will try to find out what different types of cars exist, and which one will fit their needs.
Consideration. At this point the customer starts comparing different products from different vendors to make sure they’re getting a high quality product at a fair price.
Buy. Finally, the customer makes their decision and moves forward with the transaction.