What is Content Marketing?

Content is everything you consume and take information from. This could be an article, infographic, video, podcast, gif, quarterly report, peer research, an e-book or anything else that you read, watch or listen to online or offline.

The page you have visited today has content on it. The words you are reading now are that content. More specifically, the words you are reading now are a type of content called ‘copy’ – the product produced from ‘copywriting’.

Content is always produced for a specific business purpose. This is why there are so many different formats. Content has evolved over time to be more visual, the result of an online world where so much information competes for attention.

The purpose of content marketing is to incite profitable customer action.

Unlike advertising, this is achieved not with a sales pitch, but by rewarding your audience with helpful, educational, inspirational and interesting content. This nurtures customers and builds profitable relationships.

Profitable action from content marketing comes by giving customers value. For example, a how-to article teaches someone. An infographic informs someone. A success story inspires someone. All these emotions can turn into something profitable.

Content marketing has proven to be effective for attracting customers – but only when the content provides value. This requires a deep understanding of your audience so that you can nurture them in their buying journey.

If the purpose of content marketing is to incite profitable customer action, you can safely assume that the biggest benefit of content marketing is increased sales and income.

70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing for this reason and 24% of marketers plan on increasing their investment in content marketing.

Even more incredible is the return on investment. Content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing yet generates 3x as many leads.

So, content marketing has the potential to generate significant returns. But that’s not the only benefit. You can also expect greater brand awareness, better audience retention, more social media traction and increased brand authority.

Add these benefits together and you have arguably the most powerful marketing tool. And the beautiful thing is anyone can give it a go. You only need a blog.

Content marketing ROI is a percentage that shows how much revenue you earn for every pound spent. The goal is simple – you want your content marketing activity to yield more money than it costs to generate that revenue.

The tricky part comes in separating sales, leads, and revenue. These require different approaches. For example, sales can be measured in checkout uptick. Leads can be measured by the number of enquiries you get. Revenue can be measured by an increase in your bank balance. These are all simple, easy metrics you can use.

It’s also important to consider there are KPIs for different content types. KPIs determine how effective your marketing activities are.

For blog posts and articles, you should measure website traffic and onsite engagement. You can install Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure visitor sessions and the performance of your website in Google search.

For email, you want to measure open rate, opt-out rate, subscribers, click-through rate and delivery rate. For videos, you want to measure views, unique viewers, subscribers, ad revenue, impressions, shares, comments and traffic sources.

Your content strategy should be fuelled by your business goals.

What do you want to achieve from your content marketing? Sales? Enquiries? Ad revenue? Social media traction? Whatever you want from content marketing, your content strategy will fuel your progress and keep you on track.

The first stage is the research stage. Who is your audience? What content do they like? What content works for your competitors? What types of content get the most engagement? If you can answer these questions, the second stage is easy.

The second stage is brainstorming. What are your content ideas? What should you produce first? What do you think your audience will love? You could try blog posts, how-to guides, videos, podcasts, infographics and much more.

The third stage is resource allocation. What spend is realistic for your business? Do you need to outsource some of your content production? Can you dedicate enough time to content marketing? Do you need to hire new people?

Once you have completed these three stages to creating a content strategy, you’ll be able to create a content plan and start producing amazing content.