Content Marketing: what is it? How can you apply it to your business?

Do you still remember the time when social networks were used solely and exclusively to distract us from our lives? A few years ago, the content we consumed had nothing to do with who we were off-screen. However, things have changed a lot. And today the content we consume most is not even close to what it was a few years ago.

These days, we try to be constantly evolving. We take online courses at the end of our working day, we try to read about topics that add value to us, even in the content we consume on social networks we seek knowledge.
We are a generation increasingly thirsty for evolution based on in-depth knowledge of topics that add to us.

As Marketing is an area that effectively accompanies all these changes that are taking place, today we want to talk about another marketing strategy: Content Marketing. This is one of the strategies most used by companies that want to effectively attract and retain customers.

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is one of the most popular marketing terms these days. However, this expression has been around for many years. Content Marketing is a marketing strategy focused on creating and distributing relevant content (such as topical articles, eBooks, social media posts) in which the brand is not promoted or mentioned at all. Through Content Marketing, the company is able to provide its target audience with content they are interested in, and thus attract them naturally and spontaneously. This is considered the basis of Inbound Marketing.

Inbound Marketing is the set of marketing strategies that seek to attract and convert customers through relevant content. Unlike traditional marketing, in Inbound Marketing the company doesn’t go after customers, but exploits channels such as search engines, blogs and social networks so that customers find it.

Why should you invest in content marketing?

As we mentioned earlier, the way we consume the various digital platforms has changed. However, you may still be wondering whether or not you should invest in this strategy and, to help you decide, we’re going to look at some of the advantages of content marketing:

1. Increases website traffic: did you know that 86.7% of Google users are looking for information? This means that the search engine can be the gateway to new customers for your company. Therefore, producing content that is considered relevant to your audience can make your website rank higher on Google.
2. Teach your target audience: If your audience doesn’t know your brand, they may not have in-depth knowledge of the market they’re in or the solutions your company offers. With this strategy, you may be able to teach your audience.
3. Reduces CAC: Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, is one of the most important metrics for marketing, as it allows us to draw conclusions about the cost that certain campaigns or strategies have had in acquiring new customers. With content marketing you can simplify the process of attracting new customers, since they are already looking for content that your company produces.
4. Improves your brand recognition: Another very strong point of content marketing is that it increases consumers’ recognition of your brand, which will make selling a much easier process since they already know and trust your brand.

Now that we’ve explained what content marketing is and some of its advantages, we want to talk about the strategy for applying it to your brand.

The Content Marketing strategy

Content marketing is much more than producing content for blogs, websites and social networks. You need to consider how you’re going to distribute that content, how you’re going to grow your audience and how you’re going to measure the results. To this end, we’ve separated out the 5 steps to applying content marketing correctly in your business:

1. Planning: Before you start producing content for your brand, it’s important that you define a clear objective for your strategy and how you’re going to achieve it. At this stage, define when and what you are going to publish over the next week. At an early stage, we don’t advise you to plan too far ahead, as you may need to adapt it.

2. Create your persona: Don’t confuse your persona with your target audience. Your company’s target audience is a broad percentage of society to whom you sell your product. Your persona is your ideal customer, in a more human and personalized way. This stage is very important, because with your persona defined, your communication will be much more effective.

3. Create the content: You’ve been waiting for this one, haven’t you? It’s time to create. Be it texts, images, e-books, emails or whatever is most relevant to your audience.

4. Distribute: Now that you know your persona, it’s time to deliver all the content you’ve been developing for them. Defining the channels and tools that will be used to disseminate the content is essential so that the persona you defined in step 2 receives content that interests them.

5. Analyze results: The last stage is as important as all the others, since it is by analyzing the results that you can make improvements to your strategy. For this stage, pay attention to the following points: the traffic your content is generating, interactions on social networks, the SEO of your page and the keywords you are using.

Finally, we’d like to give you a good example of content marketing? This article. We don’t want to sell you anything. We haven’t told you about our company and/or our services. All we’ve done here today is share with you something we’ve mastered, something you might not have known much about, something that is guaranteed to bring good things to your business. What we’ve done here today is Content Marketing.

Written by Inês Oliveira, digital marketer.