Content Marketing 101

When it comes to marketing your business, there are a lot of different strategies to consider. If you follow our blog regularly, you might remember the marketing tree we discussed a couple of weeks ago. Today, we’re going to look at another leaf on that tree: content marketing. 

What is content marketing?

To understand what content marketing is, you first have to understand what “content” is. Content is a written or visual message created with the intention of being shared. Therefore, content marketing is a marketing strategy centered around creating, publishing and distributing content for your audience. 

Why content marketing? 

The goal of content marketing is to communicate stories and relevant information that connect your audience to your brand and mission. If done right, this can be incredibly effective at allowing you to form relationships with your potential and current customers. It is also an inexpensive and trackable way to create leads. 

Think about it this way: if you post a photo of a new product on your business’ social media account, you can see how many people have viewed and interacted with it. You can also converse with customers about the product in the comments. With content marketing, you meet your customers where they are and interact with them in a way that encourages them to purchase the products or services you offer.

Different Types

There are a plethora of ways to approach content marketing. To ensure your marketing is effective, you have to strategize and pick the methods that work best for you. 

Search Engine Optimization: SEO is complicated but incredibly important. The goal of SEO is to optimize your content to better your ranking on search engines like Google and Bing. The biggest part of optimization is utilizing key words and phrases associated with your business that people may search for. These should be used on your website, in blogs and even social media posts. 

Blogs: With these long-form articles, you can write and post about anything you want. These are great for sharing industry news, business updates and topics relevant to your services. You can use blogs to tell your story and give a voice to your website. Blogs can also help your SEO and increase your organic search ranking.

Visual Content: Whether it’s an image, video, or graphic, visual content is used to share a story. It takes good visuals to capture the attention of an audience. This type of marketing is particularly effective when deployed on social media or websites. 

Social media: While social media can be considered its own branch of the marketing tree, it is also a form of content marketing. With social media, you create original content that is unique to each platform and allows you to connect with your audience via comments, shares and messages. Social media is also a great way to distribute other content like blogs and videos. 

Content marketing is a great way to connect with your audience. By utilizing video, blog posts and social media, you can reach your customers in a unique way on a variety of platforms.

If you’re interested in ramping up your content marketing but aren’t sure where to start, Rooted Web is here to help. We specialize in creating informative, striking content that helps your audience recognize your brand. Contact Rooted Web to see how we can help you get started today.