What’s Content material Advertising and marketing? | DigitalMarketer
There are many ways to market online.
So many, in fact, that we founded an entire company to educate people about the pros and cons of digital marketing. One aspect of digital marketing that we at DigitalMarketer talk about almost every day is content marketing.
Why do we always talk about content marketing?
Because at the moment it is everywhere.
It's on every website you visit, on every social profile you're scrolling through, and even in this article you're reading.
Content marketing is rightly a big deal.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing builds an audience of future customers, engages them to motivate them to buy your product, and then continues to interact with them so they can become brand ambassadors for your company.
This is a topic that we cover in detail in our article "Everything you ever needed to know about content marketing". At the moment, however, we are giving you the basics.
Content marketing publishes content (see, that's not that overwhelming, right?) For future and current customers.
There are several types of content that you can publish:
For example, do you remember the infamous 2015 commercial by Squatty Potty of the Harmon Brothers (over 35 million views) by the Harmon Brothers?
At DigitalMarketer, we publish an annual infographic as part of our content marketing strategy highlights our year::
And Robinhood, the financial services company, publishes 3-4 minute weekly podcast episodes about the investment world called Robinhood Snacks Minute:
What kind of content should YOU publish?
What kind of content should you publish? It is easy. The kind that your audience wants to consume.
Your customer avatar is the person for whom you created your product. You are the person who needs your product to improve your life and move it from a "bleh" state to a "yay!" Post-condition.
Every avatar wants to consume content differently. For example, suppose your customer avatar is a young mother and you sell a state-of-the-art pacifier that is fundamentally different from those already on the market.
Pop quiz time …
Should you create a 3,000-word article on how to put your baby to sleep (by promoting your pacifier) or a 5-minute video with 10 tips to help your baby fall asleep?
If you answered the latter, you are correct. But why does this 5 minute video for young mothers work better than the 3,000 word article?
Because young mothers are busy. They spend 99.9% of their time looking after a new person, and the last thing they have time for is reading a 3,000-word article hoping that it will solve their biggest problem.
They want their answer and they want them now; Therefore, this customer avatar will focus on the shortest and least time-consuming way to get the answer to his problem.
On the other hand, let's say your customer avatar is a new entrepreneur starting a business. Your product is a business academy that teaches you how to submit as an official company. Does this customer avatar want a 5-minute video that quickly talks about the different options for a company (sole proprietorship, LLC, partnership, etc.)?
Under no circumstance. They want to know what each of these terms means for their company and which type of business is best for their company. This customer avatar will be happy to read an article with 3,000 words while listening to a 5 minute video.
Knowing your customer avatar is critical to building the right content marketing strategy.
Why do you need content marketing?
You need content marketing if you want to have:
- A new customer-generating system
- A relationship with existing customers
A new customer generating system (and example)
Your content marketing strategy will bring more customers (physical or virtual) to your door by giving them a reason to visit your website, follow your social media accounts, or subscribe to your newsletter or podcast.
It's hard to convince someone to read your blog post if it's a 1000-word pitch of how great your product is. Would you read the whole article?
Most likely not. If you have not already bought the product and now want to know how it is used, you are not interested in the product.
You only care about finding the solution to your problem.
Your content needs to help your customers solve part of their main problem. For example, this article solves the problem you have: you don't know exactly what content marketing is.
This is not a pitch for DigitalMarketer products.
BUT as part of our content marketing strategy, this article fits perfectly with the products we have that solve your content marketing problems. For example,
- The DM Insider newsletter keeps you up to date on the latest developments in marketing (including content marketing)
- If you want to develop your marketing knowledge further, you can take one of our marketing courses offered by the best marketers in the industry
- And if you want access to all of this knowledge (from social media ads to copyright to newsletter creation), you can become a Lab member and stay up to date with marketing
With this article we can show you that we are marketing experts. If this is the type of content, we will give it to you free of charge. Can you imagine what we put behind our membership?
How to generate new customers through your content marketing strategy.
A relationship with existing customers (and example)
Do you remember when we said that content marketing can turn current customers into brand ambassadors? We mean that:
Your current customers can become your sales team if you treat them properly. Every time you win a new customer and get them excited about using your products, they'll tell someone about it.
Think of the cumulative effect of 1,000 customers …
If these satisfied customers just told ONE person how great your product is, you've just found another 1,000 customers without …
- Pay for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or another social network
- Bid for advertising space on Google
- Pay a marketer to market your products
It's called free marketing and it's the best kind of marketing. Not only because it's free, but also because you do a great job finding solutions to your customers' problems.
While content marketing is great for new customers, you can also use it to turn these current customers into brand ambassadors.
For example, we recently published our newsletter, the DM Insider. This was certainly a way to get the attention of our future customers. First we made the decision that ALL Lab members at DigitalMarketer have access to this newsletter.
Why?
They are already customers and are already showing us that they are happy with our content by continuing their membership of Lab. However, we have the ability to make them even happier by providing them with more digital marketing content that will help our customer avatar (business owner, agency owner and marketer) double their business.
And that makes our customers brand ambassadors and makes us one of the best educational platforms for digital marketing.
If you want to get a deep insight into the world of content marketing and want to be inspired by countless examples, read our detailed article on content marketing here.
Takeaways
- Content marketing builds an audience of future customers, engages them to motivate them to buy your product, and then continues to interact with them so they can become brand ambassadors for your company.
- What kind of content should you publish? The kind that your audience wants to consume.
- You need content marketing if you want to have a new customer generation system and a relationship with existing customers.
