A Young Person's Guide to Content Marketing

What is content marketing? Matt Boothman outlines some of the reasons why content is becoming the marketing tool of preference in a digital age.

Content marketing is the practice of giving away content that your business's customers will consider useful and valuable, but which doesn’t have to be directly related to the product or service you're trying to sell them.

'Content' can mean insights, advice, activities, research – information of nearly any kind. It can be delivered physically or online; graphically, audibly, textually or cinematically.

Blog posts are content.

The puzzles on the menus at family restaurants are content.

The lifestyle magazine your bank prints is full of content.

A Young Person's Guide to Content Marketing is content, too. You're experiencing Redhouse Lane’s content marketing efforts right now.

Content marketing is similar to the loss leader techniques supermarkets use. Selling one product at less than cost price entices customers through the door, where (you hope) they find more products they want to buy. You make a loss on the loss leader product, but make a profit overall through increased sales of other items.

Content marketing differs from this technique in that the loss leader is not a product or service your business would ordinarily sell. With content marketing, you continue to sell your products or services at your usual price, but provide potential customers with something extra. In a nutshell:

Whatever it is you do, you need to be a publisher as well.

Once, adding publishing to your business offering would have been a daunting prospect involving contracts with typesetters, printers, distributors and booksellers. Thanks to the internet, this is no longer the case.

Publishing content online almost entirely eliminates the variable costs of publishing – the costs of printing and distributing physical copies of your content. That just leaves the one-off cost of generating the content in the first place.

Online, it costs no more to distribute content to 100,000 people than it does to distribute it to just one, so the more people your content reaches, the greater the value you’re getting for your initial spend.

And the higher the quality of the content, the more people it’ll reach.

High-quality content is naturally keyword-rich, so it ranks highly in search results for relevant queries. Decide what content to generate based on your target customers’ everyday needs and wants, ensure that what you generate is high-quality, and your content will be served up to your target customers time and time again.

If your target customers find that content relevant, useful and valuable, there’s a chance they might start skipping the search engines and coming straight to you for solutions to their problems. The more relevant, useful, valuable content they discover with your name on it, the more likely this is to happen.

So it’s also important to continue generating content on a regular basis.

In another nutshell:

Any business with the resources to produce high-quality content regularly can employ content marketing successfully (where “high-quality” means relevant, useful and valuable to your target customers).
 
Why content marketing?

The emergence and popularity of content marketing owe a lot to the increasing accessibility and popularity of the internet, and especially social media.

Easy access to the internet means easy access to more information than the human brain can comprehend. Internet users quickly learn to filter out everything that isn’t relevant to them at that exact moment.

So unless they’re delivered with impossibly precise timing, traditional marketing and advertising messages are likely to be filtered out with the rest of the noise your customers are experiencing online.

When someone has need of a product or service, they won’t wait until they see an appropriate advert or receive an appropriate mailshot. They’ll look for the product or service they want, either using a search engine, by consulting their social networks (on- or offline), or by going direct to a brand they already trust.

Because content generated as part of your content marketing strategy is relevant to your target customers’ everyday needs and wants, it’s less likely to be filtered out than a traditional mailshot or advertisement, whose only value is to inform the customer about a product or service.

Content that is genuinely useful and valuable to a particular demographic can also harness the “I saw this and thought of you” effect: that is, if the content is high-quality enough, people who discover it may be motivated to share it with others in their social networks that they think might benefit from it.

In other words, high-quality content that is relevant, useful and valuable to your target customers should find its way to them organically, through search engines and social networks, with minimal effort on your part.

So a successful content marketing strategy leads to search engines and social networks consistently presenting your business to your target customers as a solution to their everyday worries. This fosters brand recognition and, more importantly, trust.

And once you have a target customer’s trust, they’re that much more likely to come directly to you when they finally have need of the product or service you’re selling.

Effective content is…

Relevant: Tailored to the everyday needs, wants and problems of your business’s target customers.

Useful: Fulfils those needs or wants, or solves those problems.

Valuable: Provides value in and of itself, not just as a signpost to your business’s products or services.

High quality: All of the above, plus well-written and (where appropriate) well designed.

To create content that is relevant and useful, you need to understand your target market. To understand your customers, you need to locate them, monitor them and engage with them – but that’s a topic for another day.

By the numbers…

• 9 out of 10 B2B marketers are using content marketing to grow their businesses [1]
• 80% of business decision makers would rather learn about your business through a series of articles than through an ad
• 70% of business decision makers say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company
• 60% of business decision makers say company content helps them to make better product decisions [2]
• 49% of consumers share content online at least once a week
• 58% of people share content because they think the recipient will find it helpful
• 58% of people share content regardless of whether it’s branded or unbranded [3]

What is content?

• Articles, blog posts and white papers

• Social media activity

• Newsletters (print or digital)

• Case studies

• Webcasts, webinars and virtual conferences

• Magazines (print or digital)

• Videos

• Microsites

• Research reports

• Infographics

• Podcasts

• eBooks

• Presentations

These are all examples of content.

[1] MarketingProfs/Junta42, B2Bcontent marketing: 2010 benchmarks, budgets and trends, http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/B2B_Trends_2010.pdf

[2] Junta42, What is contentmarketing?, http://www.junta42.com/resources/what-is-content-marketing.aspx

[3] Chadwick Martin Bailey,Consumer Pulse 2010, http://www.cmbinfo.com/cmb-cms/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Social_Sharing_Research_Report_CMB1.pdf