What is content marketing?

Content marketing: Using informative or entertaining content to help attract and retain customers and position your business as a trusted resource in your marketplace.

In other words content marketing is about offering your customers and prospects something useful instead of chasing them with sales pitches. It’s pull, not push. It’s permission based, not interruption.

Whenever you pick up a copy of your supermarket’s customer magazine – that’s content marketing. When a local businesswoman speaks at a networking event – that’s content marketing. Recipe cards from food companies, articles in the local paper or online, your website text or customer newsletters – content, content, content and more content.

Content can be written, recorded or even live but what it must do is be useful (or at least entertaining) – not just a sales pitch.

Do it well and customers will actually seek out your marketing precisely because it is useful. They’ll also be more likely to pass it on, look forward to more in future and become an engaged and loyal customer. You become their trusted resource.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

Ten Quick Examples of Content Marketing

1. A well-written and regularly updated blog
2. A customer newsletter that educates – not just sells
3. Free workshops
4. A printed trend guide for your industry
5. Educational articles you write for your local paper or trade magazine
6. A ‘How To’ video that you distribute online
7. A customer magazine
8. Online tools that your customers can use (ex. a mortgage calculator)
9. Customer case studies
10. A detailed company website with a good FAQ section

The only hard and fast rules are that content marketing is designed to educate or entertain. It’s not an overt sales pitch.

Apart from that great content can come in just about any shape or size – it simply depends on what kind of content your customers and prospective customers would like to see, read or listen to.

Content Marketing – An Alternative to the Advertising Merry-Go-Round

Most marketing is about standing on a street corner and shouting loud enough to be heard over all the other businesses doing the same. Unfortunately with so many people shouting, customers do their best to avoid advertising like the plague. Chances are you do too.

Content marketing turns this on its head. Instead of trying to grab people’s attention when they really don’t want to be listening, you create something that they actually want – useful information or entertaining content.

Customers in search of information or entertaining content actually search you out – it’s marketing they want to see. In fact, they ask for it.

Let’s take a more detailed example …

You want to landscape your backyard but have no real idea how to go about choosing a landscaping company to do the job. You’ve asked for some recommendations but nothing has stood out. So, you decide to phone around for some quotes.

Landscaping Company A has a big ad in the phone book. When you phone them up they are polite, professional and can provide plenty of references – their quote is competitive. Landscaping Company B ticks all the same boxes but they also offer a free Guide to Planning Your Perfect Garden along with your estimate. The guide gives you some new ideas, has examples of gardens they’ve done and shows you a few ways to save money. They’ve also got lots of videos on their website showing how they work, copies of articles they write for the local paper and detailed before and after photos.

Who would you phone first? If both quotes are more or less the same – which company will you choose?

Lack of Information + Too Much Information
= Customer Confusion

When people are in the market for goods or services, what they are really looking for is a solution to a problem or the best way to fill a need. Chances are they don’t have all the information they would like to have or are simply confused by all the choices and conflicting opinions. They are looking for someone to provide the information they need to make a better buying decision.

By putting that information at the heart of your marketing you become the place to go – a trusted resource.

Six reasons why you need
to check out content marketing:

1. The Status Quo Isn’t Working: You’re not getting the results you want from your existing marketing. You’re tired of cold calling, advertising or cutting prices.
2. People Come to You: Content marketing creates information and entertaining content that people want. They seek it – and you – out.
3. Smarter Prospects Make Better Buyers: Good content makes prospective customers smarter and helps them solve problems. Done well it helps you to become a trusted resource and encourages customer loyalty and new business.
4. Budget? What Budget?: It’s a long-term marketing solution that can be done on any budget – or even no budget.
5. Flexibility: It can take the form of written content, video, audio, pictorial or even live content – it suits all business types.
6. Content is an Asset: You want something that builds over time – helping you get off the marketing merry-go-round.

Some examples of content
marketing in practice

1. Content sells street fashion
2. Your Content Doesn’t Have to be Written
3. Sainsbury’s “Feed Your Family for a Fiver” campaign

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