Internet marketing consultants, social media consultants, blog writers and every marketing agency, are all talking about the importance of content marketing in today’s knowledge economy and irreversible shift to inbound marketing.
Yet very few companies or their marketing agencies actually have a Content Marketing Strategy!
Here’s the link to the state of play within the marketing industry in the UK.
55% of in-house marketers and 58% of marketing agencies said they didn’t have a content marketing strategy. [1]
Can you then imagine how few small businesses have a content marketing strategy?
In this series of blogs we will examine the best opinions from around the world as well as provide our own on:
1. What is Content Marketing?
2. What is a Content Marketing Strategy?
3. Why you need a Content Marketing Strategy?
4. What you need to do to be successful with Content Marketing?
“Content marketing – creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.” [2]
Content marketing is engaging customers and prospects without selling. It is attraction or inbound marketing rather than the old fashioned push or outbound marketing.
![The History of Content Marketing [Infographic] – Corporate Storytelling is Not New](http://www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/CMI_CM_History_medium.jpg "The History of Content Marketing [Infographic] – Corporate Storytelling is Not New")
Here’s a great infographic that illustrates that Content Marketing is not new and has been around since the late 1800’s.
Content marketing, which has been called by a number of different names, with my preference being “branded content”, is based on the premise that an educated prospect is a more profitable and loyal one and since most service based business are competing online by giving away much of their so called IP you may as well be your IP that is in front of them rather than their competitors!
Unique and valuable content is what keeps prospects on “your online property”, it’s what engages them, and it is what ultimately makes them comfortable in buying from you.
Content helps you get found in Search Engines (SEO) and is the reason prospects come to your website an/or social media profile.
Sources
[1] http://econsultancy.com/reports/content-marketing-survey-report
[2] http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/
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