Content marketing is when a business makes a strategic decision to create and share content targeted at a specific audience, with the aim of increasing a business' profits.
Content marketing is about providing useful and relevant information to your target audience on topics within your industry. In other words, it is about education and not selling.
Yes, you are doing this to increase help grow your business' clients or customers, but you are not actually pushing your products or services to them. Simply by providing helpful content, you:
By doing all of these things, acquaintances become firm supporters of your business = increased profit.
There are many different places that content marketing can shared, as are there many different places it can be shared. Here is a graphic showing the many different content marketing formats you could use:
If you choose to use a content marketing strategy, there is a journey your audience will work through. A top down approach, the majority 75% will be at the top of the funnel, actively looking for information. Around a quarter or 23% will be starting to develop a relationship with you. The final 2% are ready to take action as they know trust your business. To the right is a diagram of a content marketing sales funnel which shows the types of content formats used at each stage.
We recommend reading our article What is a Sales Funnel and How Do I Create One for further information.
Like with everything, once you have a plan for your content marketing, things work better. To create a content marketing strategy for your business, the six steps you will need to follow are:
To learn more, join our free Facebook business group Business Networking NZ to talk with others about this and other business related topics.
Posted: Friday 6 March 2020