Why content marketing is so effective.

The term “content marketing” means different things to different people. I continually run into people who get the general idea, but they’re missing some of the fundamental pieces of how it works, and hence they don’t execute it as effectively as they should.

The purpose of this post is to offer a primer on how to properly implement a content marketing plan.
Let’s start with a definition:

Think there’s something missing? Did you notice that I did not include obtaining links as part of the definition?
These are a few of our most popular content marketing pieces:

Any good content marketing campaign will net you lots of good links. However, when you make links the primary focus of your efforts, it can lead you astray. By focusing on reputation and visibility first, you will actually net the best links as a byproduct.

While the rest of this post will mention SEO benefits very little, make no mistake: An effective content marketing campaign is a major driver of increases in rankings and organic search traffic.

Links still matter a lot in the world of SEO. However, as noted above, centering your campaigns solely around old-fashioned SEO thinking is often dangerous.

For the purposes of this post, our focus is on content marketing that is designed to help bring new prospects into the top of your sales funnel.

However, in many cases, your efforts will build relationships with people who will never become customers. Those relationships can still have great value if they help spread your content far and wide.

In addition, once people are already engaged with you, the nature of the content that you should produce to move them through later stages of the sales funnel is different in structure from what I will focus on in today’s post.

The best way to think about content marketing, from a relationship and visibility perspective, is that it can drive increases in awareness of your brand, and that’s a pretty good start.

Push Vs. Pull Marketing

One of the great changes that the Web brought to us is that it put customers in more direct control of the dialog between a brand and themselves.

In the days before the Web, the main channels for communication were TV, print, and radio. No interaction was possible, and the largely sedentary customer received the commercial messages whether they wanted them or not.

The Web changed that, as there was no longer any reason for a potential customer to deal with commercial messaging they didn’t want. They could simply go to a different Web page or choose not to consume the content.
Over time, the implications of these changes became more evident. Smart brands began to realize that they really needed to engage the prospect and use content to add value to their lives.

This thinking even penetrated to TV ads, where many commercials today strive to provide some level of entertainment value and can therefore also be considered content marketing.

Go Where Your Prospects Are
As the understanding of content marketing grew, so did the number of channels available on the Web. You can publish content on your own site, develop relationships to publish content on third-party sites, or leverage social media platforms.

However, there are so many social media options and so many different sites where brands can publish content that most companies have to choose a few to focus on. For that reason, it’s critical to pick the channels that offer the most value.

Don’t try to do it all. In other words, the goal should be to “go where you go".

Source: https://searchengineland.com/content-marketing-works-230337