What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing describes a marketing approach in which a company or organization tries to attract new customers and continually engage existing ones by creating and consistently distributing relevant content. The idea is to define and capture a niche audience who will stay engaged with your content strategy and at some point start to interact with your products and services in a way that generates revenue for your company.
On a basic level, content marketing is the act of effectively communication with potential customers and existing ones without directly offering products or services for sale. It's not pushy selling. You are merely making your audience smarter or more informed by providing relevant information via blog posts, videos, etc. The idea is that if companies continue to provide their audience with relevant information, these prospects will one day pay for your service of product.
Does Content marketing work?
Absolutely! In fact, Content marketing and social media content marketing are marketing mechanisms used by some of the world's biggest brands, Like Netflix, The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft, Walmart, Home Depot and Target Corp.
Many small businesses and one-man operations also employ content marketing as a marketing technique. It does take some time for businesses to start seeing the effect of content marketing on their bottom lines, but it does happen over time.
Numbers don't lie
To further prove how effective content marketing can be, if you allocate some resources to it, I will share 5 statistics with you:
1. 83% of Business to business marketers say they have been successful to very successful with content marketing (source: CMI)
3. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%). (Source: Aberdeen)
4. 57% of marketers reported custom content was their top marketing priority for 2014. (Source: Altimeter)
5. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads. (Source:DemandMetric)
Want to know more about content marketing? Download the research material from CMI for free.
