Content marketing is currently the most widely used marketing strategy, but it is also one of the most poorly implemented. For some, it is the Holy Grail of marketing, while others say it doesn’t work because it doesn’t get results.
The problem that explains why this situation occurs is simple: the basic idea of content marketing, to attract an audience with good content that generates a good predisposition towards sales in this audience, is very easy to understand.
But this makes many people, both companies and individuals, trivialize content marketing too much. They think it’s all just a big deal.
The best example is bloggers who, under the old slogan “content is king”, start publishing content without rhyme or reason, one after the other, and then complain that the results never come.
But why doesn’t it work like that, so what do you need to do to make content marketing work?
That’s what I’m going to explain today, from A to Z, in this post.
What is content marketing and why is it so important?
Let’s start by properly defining what content marketing is.
To do so, I’m going to pull from Joe Pulizzi, the most reputable “guru” in this field, according to whom content marketing would be “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and grab the attention of a well-defined target audience, with the goal of driving them to become future customers.”
This content is typically published in media such as blogs, YouTube, social media, newsletters (mailing lists), etc. But other channels are also used, such as webinars, eBooks, infographics….
In short, it can be done with any media that allows massive dissemination of free content.
Look at the words highlighted in bold in the above definition and you will already have an important part of the answer to why there are so many sites that fail to attract anyone.
If, on the other hand, you analyze sites that have been successful, you will see that they meet Joe Pulizzi’s definition very well and, in particular, these criteria highlighted above.
Content marketing figures and statistics
There are many sites that have already successfully implemented content marketing strategies, this very blog, without going any further.
We can find statistics such as the one from Radiance Solution that speak of 88% of marketers who consider content marketing an essential part of their business.
To put all this a little more in perspective, let’s look at some more figures. Here’s a short list of a few, which I thought were particularly interesting:
“Content marketing is 62% cheaper than outbound marketing, but generates 3 times more leads.” Source: Content Marketing Institute.
“Small businesses that have a blog will, on average, have 126% higher lead growth than those that don’t.” Source: Content Marketing Institute.
“Websites with a blog have 434% more pages in search results than those without a blog.” Source: Content Marketing Institute.
“Since 2015 the amount of content shared on social networks has dropped by 50%.” Source: Cision. It is worth reflecting that this data shows that the importance of other traffic sources (SEO, paid, etc.) is increasing.
“Content marketing accounts for up to 26% of total marketing budgets”. Source AzaharMedia.
The relationship between inbound marketing and content marketing.
If you’ve read about Digital Marketing, you’ve probably already come across the term “inbound marketing” or “attraction marketing” more than once.
As the name itself indicates, in this type of marketing the idea is to attract the customer so that they come to us motivated in a natural way. This contrasts with outbound marketing, which usually interrupts them in their activity to get their attention (TV ads, etc.).
Well, the term content marketing is sometimes mistakenly used as a synonym for inbound marketing and vice versa. The truth is that content marketing is simply a concrete way of doing inbound marketing and it is widely used, but they are not the same thing.
What are the best tools for content marketing?
There are a myriad of content marketing tools. I would have to make several posts to give a reasonably complete overview. It is complicated to create a ranking of the “best” ones, because this is something very relative to your objectives, the media you use, etc.
That’s why I prefer to make a broader tour with several important tools that can potentially be of interest to you, with a bias towards the tools that I personally use the most.
Content creation and dissemination channels
Let’s start with the most obvious: the creation, publication and dissemination of content. Most of these tools are already well known to you.
We are talking, on the one hand, about the different types of websites; blogs, video platforms (YouTube, webinars, etc.), podcasts… and, on the other hand, digital media such as eBooks, presentations, infographics, reports, whitepapers, etc.
Which are the best?
I would say that more than the best, the most important, because of their visibility potential, are blogs and YouTube. Therefore, whether as a small entrepreneur or as a company, I would focus my efforts primarily on these two channels.
Why do they have so much more visibility potential than the rest?
The answer is very simple: because of Google, if you are in a powerful thematic niche (with many searches) and you know how to position yourself in the right searches, Google will bring you a huge amount of traffic that is very difficult (or expensive) to replicate in other ways.
But it is also “passive visibility”. That is to say, once a content is positioned in Google, traffic arrives every day in autopilot mode.
This brings us to the question of how to position content in Google, a key topic that deserves its own section, the SEO section that you can find a little further down in this post.
Social networks are also channels for disseminating and creating content. But social networks are another special case that deserves a section of its own, so I will also return to them below in a section of their own.
