What is content marketing? And how do you make it work in your organisation?

What is content marketing?

A decade ago, the term “content marketing” didn’t really exist. People talked about blogging and posting information on social platforms. But now it has become a discipline in its own right.

Now, of course, entire agencies exist to help organisations market their products and services by creating and sharing content.

And lately, we’ve had a few conversations with smaller organisations who think they should be doing something, but don’t know where – or how – to start.

So if content marketing something you’ve heard of, but aren’t quite sure about, this post is part of a beginner’s guide we’ll be sharing over the next few weeks.

So what is it?

Content marketing is when you create content (which can be anything – including videos, articles, graphics, white papers and podcasts) that is specifically designed to get people interested in your products and services.

So what makes content marketing different from regular marketing? This is a good question, because a lot of organisations and content marketing agencies take the view that it is something very different to traditional marketing.

We’re not persuaded that this is the case – certainly not in terms of what it should be doing for your organisation (ie, building relationships, driving awareness and sales).

Where it is a little different is in philosophy and emphasis. Traditional marketing works around campaign cycles. So if you’re a certain type of financial services company, you’ll be sure to get in touch with all your customers at the beginning of March to remind them to use up their ISA allowance. This is a discrete campaign and success will be measured in terms of response and return on investment (ROI).

Content marketing doesn’t happen in campaign bursts. Instead, it’s a constant stream of content that should be useful to your customers and help them to get to know, like and buy from you.

What’s the “content” in content marketing?

“Content” is a catch-all term that means anything you can share, publish or send out. It can include videos, blog posts, articles, podcasts, infographics… absolutely anything.

We take a very broad view of what constitutes the “content” in content marketing. We’d include PR, guest blogging – even hand-written messages (if they’re targeted and for marketing purposes).

However, in practice, content marketing is often perceived as being digital content only – which means the terms “content marketing” and “social media marketing” are sometimes used interchangeably.

The only problem with this is if you think you can only share interesting and helpful information via social media. There really are no limits to what can become part of your content marketing mix.

What is Hubspot?

It’s an integrated customer relations management and social media marketing platform. In other words, it’s a tool that allows you to bring your contacts database together with your social media marketing database. Hubspot is just one of many of these types of platforms.

They can be extremely useful IF you are marketing lower price-point, lower consideration products or services. So if you have a product that costs less than a tenner and you want to sell it in very high volumes, then an integrated platform can be a great way of monitoring your results and understanding what kinds of content works for your ideal customer.

However, we’re much less convinced about their ability to convert B2B prospects – or anyone buying something that costs a lot and where the purchase takes some thinking about.

You can read our thoughts on B2B content marketing here.

Does content marketing work in B2B?

It depends what you mean by “work”. Will content marketing bring you thousands more customers a couple of months after you start doing it? Absolutely not. It may not even bring you tens of new customers in the first few weeks of doing it.

However, what you can expect it to do is help you to forge relationships with potential clients, and keep you front of mind when your ideal client has both budget and buy-in.

What do I need to think about when I start?

You’ll need a content marketing strategy, resource and processes in place. We’ll be covering all of these in a post next week. If you’d like to be amongst the first to know when we share it, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Or if you just want to talk to us, we’d be really interested to hear about your ambitions. This is how to get in touch.

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