In today’s marketing landscape, content is king. Content, however, is also everywhere. This means that producing content that truly stands above the rest becomes harder and harder each passing day.
Mark and Eric are here to help. In this episode of Here’s Why, they will explain how to implement a content marketing plan that will not only increase the awareness of your brand, but will help you build your brand and your customer base.
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Full Transcript:
Eric: Mark, what are you doing now?
Mark: Content marketing!
Eric: That’s not content marketing. Stay tuned as I explain how to properly implement a content marketing plan that increases awareness of your brand, builds your reputation, and brings you more customers.
Mark: Eric, a lot of people talk about content marketing these days, but few seem to know what it actually is. Let’s start off with your definition of content marketing.
Eric: Sure thing, Mark. To me, content marketing is the practice of creating, publishing, and sharing content with the goal of building the reputation and visibility of your brand.
Mark: Ok, you just said that effective content marketing would help me build the reputation and visibility of my brand. Why is that important?
Eric: The web has brought about a huge shift in the relationship between buyers and sellers. Customers are much more in control of the conversation that goes on pre-sale. Brand’s used to have a megaphone and customers were forced to passively listen. No more! Now sellers have to work hard to attract consumers to their message. So it’s no longer enough just to broadcast a message about your brand. Your company’s message needs to be couched in content that is helpful, engaging, and even entertaining.
Mark: So the kind of content you publish is critical, but what about where you publish it?
Eric: That’s also crucial. These days, with web sites, apps, social channels, and many other online outlets, the opportunities for publishing are nearly infinite. But that doesn’t mean you should publish anywhere and everywhere. You’ve got to focus on where your prospects are, where do they hang out online, as it were, where do they go do consume and interact with content.
Mark: What about social media? That’s a great outlet for promoting and spreading your content, right?
Eric: Indeed it is. And as you see here, social media can generate a rolling benefit. Relevant, engaging content can help increase your social presence, while at the same time sending it visitors, subscribers, and links, all of which increase the ROI of the content. We haven’t even touched on content promotion outside of social and the importance of relationship building.
Mark: But Eric, the camera’s running out of memory.
Eric: That’s OK. I wrote an extended article that will walk you through all the steps you need to take to develop an effective content marketing plan. You’ll find it at the link on your screen.
Mark: Thanks, Eric. I’ll be sure to check out that resource, and you should too. And don’t forget to be on the lookout every Monday for another episode of Here’s Why, where Eric and I explain the “why” behind the “what” of digital marketing.
As always Eric & Mark good article / commentary without really explaining how to find the right “CDN” per related business.
– maybe that’s covered elsewhere –
Has Rand’s surfacing of the BuzzSumo findings on blogging changed your views Mark?
Not at all. Underscores the need to do the RIGHT type of content marketing, which most people never do.
Not sure how a Content Delivery Network (CDN) has anything to so with this post/video? It’s about content marketing, not services that speed delivery of web pages.
Randy, I wouldn’t say it has changed my views, as I always intuited this to be the case, but the Buzzsumo study certainly made me take notice. From here on out I will probably stress more emphatically that while social amplification of your content can lead to more links, it is not at all automatic. Your content has to hit that sweet spot of not only being highly sharable but also of the quality and depth that tends to earn natural links. Buzzfeed content is insanely sharable, but earns very few links.
To pick up the social media part: There was a recent study my colleague summarized in a blog post about the social shares. It says that expecially list posts, why posts and videos are shared most on social media. This is a good indicator to publish “shareable” content in your content marketing strategy.
Here is the summary: http://www.amazeemetrics.com/en/blog/content-marketing-which-content-generates-most-links-and-social-shares
Hi Eric,
What is your key metrics for content marketing?
(Share, view, clicks, etc…)
There are many, and what to use depends on the circumstances. However, some that are good to look at are:
a. Measurements of reputation and visibility, such as brand searches and unaided awareness
b. Measurements of the reach of sites where you successfully publish content on 3rd party sites
c. Social share counts, and total audience reached
d. Links and Domain Authority of the links obtained
e. Rankings
In our company, we usually use page views & CTR as our key metrics. We optimize the title so people read them more (higher page views) and then in the article we optimize the links to our desired page, usually using a CTA button so we can get higher CTR.
Great article to learn content marketing. Very helpful for beginner like me.
I agree with this answer. “content marketing is the practice of creating, publishing, and sharing content with the goal of building the reputation and visibility of your brand”. good to know this. great article …