What Is Content Marketing? Simple Definition + Starter Guide

The right format corresponds with what stage of the sales cycle you’re creating content for. Another important consideration includes what formats will best help you showcase value. Podcasts give your audience a way to engage with your brand when they’re away from their computer—like when they’re driving in the car, going for a walk, or commuting to work. The goal of this long-form, audio-only medium is to provide helpful information your audience can use in their daily life, thus building trust in your brand.

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Ebooks and whitepapers are often used to capture potential customers in the “awareness” stage of the sales cycle. Content, in its various forms, is key to promoting your brand, products, and services to potential customers. Content marketing ensures that the content you produce, whether visual, audio, or text, reaches more people and convinces them to interact more with your business. Some people prefer to listen to their content, instead of reading or watching it. Podcasts have opened a new avenue to content marketing, helping to increase brand awareness by reaching an audience through authentic conversations.

What Is Blogging, And Why Does It Matter?

With these four parts in mind, you can create a solid content marketing strategy to propel your business forward. To start with content marketing, you need to understand your target audience and their needs at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Then, create content for each stage, keeping in mind the latest content marketing trends. Utilizing content marketing tools can help streamline your process and enhance the quality of your content.

• Content marketing is the publishing of written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business.
• By putting effort into producing content that serves a purpose to existing and potential customers, delivering valuable advice can develop and nurture relationships.
• Laura is a freelance writer specializing in small business, ecommerce and lifestyle content.
• Success in content marketing comes from knowing your readers and creating valuable, well-placed content they’ll want to engage with.

That way, everyone involved in creating content, from writers to editors to SEO professionals, knows who the content is meant to serve. And if you want to dig deep into who your content’s audience will be, I recommend trying HubSpot’s “Make My Persona” tool. In fact, if you talk to customers regularly, you probably already have a good idea of what problems they have… problems that your audience can help solve. That doesn’t even include the millions of people who have seen our content on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Identify relevant keywords and phrases that your target audience is searching for and incorporate them naturally into your content. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush to discover high-volume keywords with low competition. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on sharing useful, fitting, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience or target audience.

This could be through solving a problem, teaching something valuable, answering questions, addressing pain points, or simply providing entertainment. One of the leaders in the field of content marketing is digital marketing platform HubSpot. Like River Pools and Spas, the company offers a vast array of blog posts on nearly every possible question their target audience might have. Not only do these include topics specific to digital marketing, but they also include other business and sales tips relevant to their target audience. These blog posts are supplemented with longer eBooks, which hone in on specific topics to provide in-depth informational content to their audience.

There are many ways to distribute content, and https://vocal.media/journal/preparing-a-product-for-global-markets-practical-insights-from-derribar-ventures-limited the same piece of content can be shared and repurposed to fit different distribution channels and audiences. Social media platforms are an effective way to drive traffic and reach a larger audience. Content marketers should leverage social media to share content, engage with customers, and build relationships with potential leads. For its content marketing strategy, GoPro shows us another type of visual content. Rather than engaging its audience through humor, GoPro grabs our attention with high-quality, user-generated video content filmed with—you guessed it—the GoPro action camera.