According to Wikipedia, content marketing is not focused on selling, but on simply communicating with customers and prospects.
The purpose of content marketing is to inspire business and loyalty from buyers by delivering consistent, relevant and ongoing information of value.
Content marketing is also very good for SEO, because each and every blog page you create increases the size (number of indexed pages), and authority of your web site and also increases the chances of your web site appearing in the search results for multiple combinations of keywords.
And once you have created that nice tight little ball of useful content, you can promote that content on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google Plus.
The great thing about content marketing is that it doesn’t matter if you run a small tyre shop in West Ipswich, or if you are the CEO of a global bank, content marketing in it’s most basic form (blog posts and emails), is cheap to execute, and over time has enormous impact.
Where people get stuck with content marketing is that they worry about the aesthetics of their communication rather than the content. ie style over substance
“Is the Santa Christmas banner the right shade of red, should we include a flashing icon and slider images to give it a bit of “edge”, maybe a bigger logo will make it look better?”
Truth – nobody cares what it looks like, it’s what it says that really counts. If you have a choice of spending $500 on graphic design and layout or $500 on research and copy writing, take the copy writing every time.
Some of the most effective content marketing is good old plain emails. No fancy graphics, no beautifully crafted html email newsletters, just plain old text.
Not only are fancy email newsletters fiddly and time consuming to produce, in many cases they are never read because spam filters don’t like too many graphics, too much html code or too many links. And have you tried to read a fancy-pancy email newsletter on a smart phone?
Keep it simple, give good content and deliver consistently. Content marketing builds trust, builds traffic and builds business.
Why not give content marketing a go in 2014?
