Content marketing is a marketing technique for creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience.
Its objective is to drive profitable customer action.
This key to mastering content marketing is realizing it is all about storytelling. Our attention is drawn to great stories.
Content Marketing vs. Advertising
The lines between content marketing and advertising are sometimes blurred. By definition, content marketing is a pull marketing tactic, in that it organically attracts the attention of your consumer. If you create a piece of content that people want to seek out and consume, that particular piece of content is considered to be a part of a content marketing campaign.
Advertising is a form of push marketing, by definition, because it is content that is created to be literally displayed to a customer. Ads are displayed intentionally to customers in order to make them desire the product. Take note, desiring the end product is not the same as desiring the content.
Sometimes, the piece of content is considered to be both an ad as well as content marketing. It all comes down to how it is received by the consumer, and whether or not they found value in the content.
Examples
A few examples of content marketing include blogs (like ours!). Infographics. Webpages
Case Studies. Podcasts. Books. White papers. eBooks. Apps. Public speaking. Presentations.
Why is this form of marketing the key to success in 2023?
Consider the customer buying process:
1. Awareness
2. Researching
3. Consideration
4. Purchase Decision
Content marketing digs in to the first two steps of the buying process. This approach can also be altered to fit the Consideration phase.
Leave a Reply