What retains and converts a customer? It is the content you build. This content should be valuable, relevant, and consistent to the defined audience, this marketing strategy is called content marketing. But What is Content Marketing in Digital Marketing? Is it the same? Let’s find out.
Digital Marketing aims to leverage a variety of digital technologies tactics like SEO, email marketing, and to use all these tools optimally, we need a technique to design, create and distribute top ranking and valuable content, this is what is Content Marketing in Digital Marketing.
Let us understand some basic concepts, content marketing strategy and how to do content marketing in the coming paragraphs and what is content marketing in digital marketing.
Why should MBAs learn Content Marketing?
Let us now understand in depth, what is content marketing in digital marketing and why MBAs learn content marketing.
With the help of content marketing, you can give clear and detailed information about your products and services. Therefore, as a manager it is effective and efficient in building a reputation, advertise and give a proper result-oriented marketing, making it in line with the MBA program.
What is the role of a manager? It is to guide and direct the organization to achieve its goals. The goals of an organization is usually to sell their products and services and earn maximum profits.
With content marketing you can build trust with your audience, improve conversion, connect with your customers, and generate leads. Additionally, in today’s age, customers expect high quality, consistent content from their favourite brands and content marketing can help do that.
Some benefits of content marketing and why MBAs should learn it
- Builds brand awareness and loyalty- Content marketing is a cost-effective way to build brand awareness and increase customer loyalty by creating consistent and trustworthy content. It also enhances the brand visibility.
- Increase website traffic- Relevant and valuable content will attract more customers to the website, hence it Is important to learn how to create such content.
- Increased sales- By providing information, the marketers give a clear insight into their offerings. This would help you target customers who are extremely interested in the product and willing to buy it, therefore, increasing sales.
Let us now understand in detail what is content marketing in digital marketing, and how we can learn and optimize this marketing tool.
Concepts and strategy
In the upcoming paragraphs, we will learn about what ae the concepts in content marketing and what strategies can be used to implement them in the best possible way, which will eventually help us answer the question of “what is content marketing in digital marketing”.
Benefits of Content Marketing in Digital Marketing
Content Marketing helps boost SEO results, helping your page rank on the first page. This further helps in generating traffic, conversions, and leads for your brand. Content marketing creates organic and long term and sustainable results. Therefore, to sell more products and services, build brand awareness, etc. it is extremely important for managers to learn content marketing.
Now what to do in order to enjoy the benefits? Let's dig deeper!
Effective Content
We’ve all heard that content is king and that you need to write high-quality content, or now “10x content,” as coined by Rand Fishkin. Now we will see how can we make our content noticeable by Google crawlers.
Qualities of effective content
The content that sells and makes itself useful to the customer is called effective content. If the content is good,
It will help you target the exact audience, hence saving costs and efforts.
Tell your audience exactly what they want to know, it educates them, increasing the conversion rate.
Effective content follows the SEO guidelines, considers readers above anything else and ensures that the readability is easy for the reader, the content is relevant and easy to understand, website is attractive, etc.
Type of content
In content marketing we can have multiple types like, blogging (the thing that you’re reading right now!), Video, podcasting, Info-graphics, email, etc., all comes under content marketing.
Different content is used under different situations, like blogging is what’s happening currently, and gets old quickly, video content suits the most on YouTube where long videos are updates, etc.
Different content is used under different situations, like YouTube uses detailed video content that is very informative on the other hand, Facebook gives videos which are not informative but entertaining.
Here’s an interesting video on content marketing, that could help you answer what is content marketing in digital marketing.
Content for Community
Developing a content journey to support your buyer’s journey is a task that requires research and planning.
Content alignment with the buyer’s journey
First, we need to understand the buyer, what is it that they are trying to learn? What are their goals and objectives? What type/form of content are they looking for? All these questions need to be answered and addressed.
Secondly, we need to create measurable execution plans and plan out the tactics for executing and path to measuring performance.
Finally, the most important is to create high quality content, that is valuable and useful to the customers.
Image source: akoonu.com
Community Management
The process of building an authentic community among a business’s customers, employees, and partners through various types of interactions, to create a network to connect, share and grow is called community management.
The best example of how well companies create content to engage their customers is Netflix. Netflix always creates amazing, interactive content to engage their audience and be in the limelight.
May it be creating memes or giving quirky replies to their audience, Netflix is doing well in community management.
Source: Netflix
Content Marketing Strategy
Translating business objectives and goals into a plan and using content as a primary means of achieving those goals. Content strategy guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.
We should have a content strategy for SEO, for customer success, and sales as these are the three factors that would lead your company to the ultimate goal of earning profits.
Here’s an article that tells you about the steps to make a good content strategy.
Also read: How to create a successful content marketing strategy
Using Content Research to find opportunities
Content Research is the concept of analysing content online and developing a strategy based on these conclusions. Content research can be done on your own content or that of competitors, to find new opportunities to grow and expand.
Social Listening
As the name suggests, it is the monitoring of conversation on social media platforms to know the customers perception about your brand. There are multiple social listening tools that give the company access to detailed information they are looking for.
Social listening allows get real time data about the interests, questions, trending topics, and demographic characters that can ensure that your content is targeting the right audience, therefore increasing your ROI.
Competitor content analysis
You must have come across the word SWOT, every strategy, marketing lecture you take, you do a SWOT. Why do we do a SWOT? It’s done to understand the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats to a company or an industry, to know about the competitors, etc.
Competitor content analysis is done for the same reason, to understand the competitors. How are they doing in the business? What are their strong points? What is their USP?
All these questions and their analysis helps us improve our own content.
Content Audit
Now that we’ve analysed the competitors, the next step is to analyse ourselves. Is the content relevant to the customers? Are the right people being targeted? Does the content needs any update?
All these questions are answered and the companies discover what their current strengths are, which areas need improvement, which helps them make new plans and implement them to achieve their goals.
Developing a content marketing plan
Anything and everything requires a plan, and so does content marketing. In the upcoming paragraphs we will see how developing a content marketing plan can be helpful in elaborating on our question of what is content marketing in digital marketing.
Content Marketing goals
To have a goal is necessary for any task you do it life, so is the case with content marketing. Only after the goals are clear can we establish a blueprint of what needs to be done.
Content marketing goals should be clearly defined. Content should be in alignment with the goals, should match the persona of the customer (content marketing should be targeted)
Content topics
If you’re a coffee seller with both hot and cold varieties in coffee. Now, I am a customer and want to drink only hot coffee, I go to the search bar and search hot coffee.
Now if I land on your page and the first thing I see is cold coffee types and food items, etc and not what I want to see, it may divert me from your page to your competitors who have better content topics.
It is therefore extremely important to follow digital content creation guidelines to improve your relevance to the customers.
A solution to the above situation would be to create different landing pages so that is a customer wants cold coffee, that page has content only related to cold coffee.
Content calendar
A content calendar is a written schedule of when and where you plan to publish the upcoming content.
It is like a time-table, keeps you disciplined and ensures that the content is released regularly so that the customers stay connected to your brand.
Let me share a snapshot of the content calendar our website itself! Now you know why we’re so organized!
Content management system
Another important point is content management.
A content management system is a computer software used to manage the creation and modification of digital content. It helps build a website without needing to write all the codes.
WordPress is one system that is used to create this content, even the content you’re reading has been built on word-press! Again, let me share a picture of the same.
CMS helps analyse the SEO practices are being followed or not, helps improve readability of your content and provides predetermined structures for inserting images, texts, links, etc. to make the content more appealing
Creating and curating content
We create content for our website, but we can also direct our customers to some other website for more details, this is creating and curating content, let us now understand in detail the stakeholders, brand components and content personalization in content marketing.
Content stakeholders
Product manager and target customers are the two key stakeholders in content marketing. Balancing between customer’s needs and manager’s budget and demand is critical for the success.
For example, you know that as a content manager you need to follow certain SEO practices and show content that is customer oriented, but a manager might just want to highlight his/her product in a certain way, or be concerned about the budget, etc.
Content creation and curation
Content creation is the content you create on your own. For example, I am creating this blog. And this is a part of content creation of Super Heuristics. On the other hand, if I share the content from an external source outside this blog, that is called content curation.
We know why content creation is important, but why would we want to link another website to our website and divert our customers?
- Gives more content
- Saves time
- Can build thought leadership and bring in new points to your brands content. It will provide your audience with alternative views and resources.
- Helps build new relationships with other businesses, If you link their website, they might link yours too.
Brand Components
This is the visual face of your brand, its looks and feel. There are 8 important components of brand identity, namely,
- Definition-Description of what your business is, who you are, what you offer and to whom.
- Brand Values- Ideals that your brand represent
- Promise of a Brand- Underlying guarantee that you’re offering to your customers
- Brand Identity- It includes the logos, brand graphics, colors, fonts, and images.
- Differentiation- Includes your Unique Selling Proposition, what differentiates you from your competitors, what do you offer that is so special that people will by your product.
- Market Position- This is the position in the market that is held buy your brand, based on a calculation of quality and price.
- Brand Messaging- Includes things like, tagline, positioning statement, brand promise statement, key messages, and marketing copy.
- Brand Experience- This is the way in which your customers interact with the products or services you offer.
Content Personalization
Customization is a strategy that enables the firm to make personalized content for individual or a close group of customers based on the specifications they want.
This enables the customers to want whatever special content type they want, helping the business to retain these customers and achieve goals.
Publishing and Distributing content
Now that we have learned to develop content and understood the meaning of what is content marketing in digital marketing, let us understand the various platforms and strategies used in publishing and distributing content.
Content Platforms
A content platforms is a standardized means of presenting information, for example, Twitter and Facebook are also content platforms. These focus on their user’s scarce attention, since they are all different they use different tactics to do the same.
Facebook for example shows fun content, twitter is an interactive platform for business and news purposes, less of entertainment purpose and YouTube is a video content platform showing detailed informational videos.
Content Promotion Strategies are also used on these content platforms to drive more traffic to the website, this image below gives some strategies to promote your content.
Metrics and Performance
Now we have learned to develop content and understood the meaning of what is content marketing in digital marketing. Let us now understand how we can measure these performances and compared across competitors and our own content.
Content marketing ROI
How much revenue you gained from content marketing to what you spend on its creation is called content marketing ROI. Formula for the same given below
Content marketing metrics
Content marketing metrics measures how well the website is performing in getting, increasing and converting the customers. There are many tools to measure the efficiency of our page,
Is the content earning revenues? Sales and lead quality helps in measuring this. Is your content driving engagement? Web traffic, onsite engagement, social media ROI- they quantify this. Does your content show up in search results? SEO success, exposure and authority measures this.
Summary
In the article above I talked in detail about what is content marketing in digital marketing. And also the importance of content marketing in digital marketing.
We talked about the concepts and strategy of content marketing in digital marketing. Like Benefits of Content Marketing in Digital Marketing, Qualities of effective content, Type of content, Content alignment with the buyer’s journey, Community Management, Content Marketing Strategy.
Further, discussion about Using Content Research to find opportunities, Developing a content marketing plan. Along with that we read about Creating and curating content, Publishing and Distributing content. Most importantly Metrics and Performance.
This article gives a detailed glimpse in various parameters on what is content marketing in digital marketing.
Nice Post.
Informative post.