Definition of Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of delivering relevant and valuable information to your audience. What this means is that you must create content based off analysis from your current customers as well as what the market is asking what they want information on. Where most brands fail, is in delivering their content in only one form.

Here is what I mean by that. Content is consumed in several ways by your audience. Some like to consume it through video while others like to consume it through written articles or even audio. Without fully understanding who likes to consume what from your audience, the best approach is to ensure every single piece of your content that you are creating is produced in all three of these mediums.

More definitions:

Joe Pulizzi’s Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Neil Patel takes this definition a little deeper:

“[It’s] a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.”

And Rebecca Lieb:

“It isn’t advertising. It isn’t push marketing, in which messages are sprayed out at groups of consumers. Rather, it’s a pull strategy – it’s the marketing of attraction. It’s being there when consumers need you and seek you out with relevant, educational, helpful, compelling, engaging, and sometimes entertaining information.”

Build Brand Equity

Going about content marketing the right way will be beneficial to your brand. It’s all about building brand equity, meaning your brand becomes more valuable over time as you build high-quality and valuable pieces of content. The more you answer your audience’s questions, the more your brand becomes an authority within your industry.

Content Marketing is NOT

One thing we need to understand is content marketing is not writing marketing content. The difference here is content marketing is ultimately answering the questions your audience are craving answers for thereby delivering the value your audience is seeking.

This is not to say content marketing does not create opportunities for sales, however, your main goal when putting together a content marketing strategy and delivering and executing on the actual content is to ensure you are providing value. The ultimate question to always ask as if you were in the shows of our audience is, “what’s in it for me?”

Become a Thought Leader with Financial Assets

What this means is for you as a brand is by becoming thought leaders in your space, delivering the content that your audience is craving, they will come to you therefore driving demand to your brand.

We as brands need to understand and look at our content as financial assets. They are investments in our future of becoming the authority in the industry, driving leads to your sales team and driving demand to your brand. Content marketing is less expensive than other marketing avenues such as paid advertising. If you have an in-house person that can deliver constant, quality, and valuable content you are going to further your authority in the industry you serve. This helps to fill your pipeline with new leads. There is a key purpose for ads when it comes to your content, and we will talk about that in a future upcoming article.