What is content marketing?

In simple terms, content marketing is making stuff like blogs, social media, podcasts, videos, apps memes that draw customers to your brand by informing them of something they already want to know. It's part of a framework called inbound marketing, where you create something that the audience seeks out as opposed to creating something that you force on your audience. You wanted to know about content marketing.

The truth is that, for most businesses, the alternative is worse. You see before content marketing. There was this thing called advertising, otherwise known as outbound marketing. Outbound marketing was the thing that interrupted your audience, popping up in the middle of TV shows or while reading a magazine or scrolling a webpage. Nobody really liked outbound marketing, because it was disruptive like that.

But it was the only way for brands to reach potential customers. It was the only way for customers to find out about a brand's products and services, but they still had to remember those brands when it came time to actually make a purchase, And if you're anything like me, you forget things. So not a particularly efficient system.

It's there when customers want it to be, and invisible when they don't, and when done right, inbound marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all. It feels like a seamless part of the customer's experience in discovering your brand. Want to see more examples of content marketing to grow your business. Let's go back to that list from earlier. Blogs are a great content marketing platform for brands because they're relatively easy to set up easy for the audience to discover via search and have a long tail in terms of remaining viable for future customers.

One of my favorite brand blogs is Barkpost by pet supply company Bark. The blog is full of the type of content that dog lovers would love to search for. There's doggy health and doggy travel, and doggy training.

Another easy to activate content marketing method is social media, but because it seems so easy, a lot of brands do it wrong. They treat social like outbound marketing that interrupts the user's experience when scrolling.

What is an example of good social media marketing?

Now apps can be complicated and expensive, and you don't want to just replicate the online shopping experience. But if you can create something truly useful for your audience, then they could end up opening the app every day and you can't beat that sort of inbound brand exposure. We looked at a lot of branded apps in the app store. Of course, the one that stood out came from one of the best brands in the world. The Nike training club app takes users through daily fitness, routines, nutrition tips, and wellness habits prescribed by some of the top trainers in the world.

It's the sort of app that demands repeated use to get results. In fact, one of the best things about the app is that it can remind users to open them several times a day, and we welcome those sorts of reminders.

Yes, quality content can deliver an audience long after it's been published, but you need to post new content and update old content consistently for it to be truly effective. The island of abandoned blogs is the saddest place on the internet. So before you begin a content marketing project make sure you have the resources to commit to it over the long term. One of the most often abandoned forms of content marketing is podcasting, And this is too bad because it's one of the most effective and exciting forms of content marketing out there.

The best content marketing impacts your audience in a powerful way. 

So how do you get started?