Usually when clients ask about content marketing, it’s usually driven by a desire to increase SEO. I applaud these conversations because whether the business knows it or not- what they’re really wanting is to use content marketing to generate leads.
What is Content Marketing?
It’s more than just generating web content or blogs – it’s activating all of the relevant channels that will help you deliver your message to your target market at a point of relevancy. In general, there are four buckets of content that the channels typically fall into:
Types of Content
Owned Media
This is the content you create on your website. Blogs or thought leadership, downloadables, key sales benefits for your product – that sort of thing. Consider owned media the kind of thing you’d want to drive traffic back to for lead generation.
Shared Media
This is typically social media, which these days is a healthy number of platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok are the popular ones right now but don’t forget about Youtube, Reddit and others that might be relevant for your target audience.
Earned Media
These are signals that other people care about your content, too. Earned media is when your press release gets picked up, or when someone talks about you online and simply tags you into the conversation. This is essentially Word of Mouth in the digital age.
Paid Media
Just like it sounds – this is the content you pay for. Programmatic video, podcast advertising, paid search – even social media advertising. If you payin’ for it, it’s in this category. Typically, we’ve led with paid media in our strategies but in this case, I challenge you to think about how you can use paid media to boost your owned media.
Crafting Your Content
We go into a more in-depth discussion on how you can create content for your business here.
In your plan, be sure to also include:
- Events
- Industry related content
- Culture
- Mission and Value
- WHY you exist
Continue Researching
Your content should evolve just like the online channels and the people who use them do. Which, for a marketer’s life, that’s at least annually. Nowadays video is all the rage. But before you get overwhelmed by the new bright and shiny objects, think about how you can repurpose thoughts and ideas you’ve already promoted in these new formats. When it comes to content marketing, working smarter is always better than working harder.