Content marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used in order to achieve the following business goals: attract attention and generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage a community of online users. Content marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free content as well as by helping companies create sustainable brand loyalty, providing valuable information to consumers, and creating a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.
Content marketing starts with identifying the customer's needs. After that, the information can be presented in a variety of long form and short form formats, including news, video, white papers, e-books, infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer articles, photos, blogs, etc. Examples of short form content include short blog posts and social media posts.
Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy.
History
Traditional marketers have long used content to disseminate information about a brand and build its reputation. Taking advantage of technological advances in transportation and communication, business owners began applying content marketing techniques in the late 19th century. Content marketing aims to attract and retain audiences by consistently creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and free content.| Year | Author/Organization | Action taken |
| 1732 | Benjamin Franklin | Issuance of Poor Richard's Almanack to promote his printing business |
| 1888 | Johnson & Johnson | introduced a publication called "Modern Methods of Antiseptic Wound Treatment" targeted to doctors who used bandages. They also released two publications that contained tips for the medical community. |
| 1895 | John Deere | launched the magazine The Furrow providing information to farmers on how to become more profitable. The magazine, considered the first custom publication, is still in circulation, reaching 1.5 million readers in 40 countries in 12 different languages. |
| 1900 | Michelin | Developed the Michelin Guide, offering drivers information on auto maintenance, accommodations, and other travel tips. 35,000 copies were distributed for free in this first edition. |
| 1904 | Jell-O | Jell-O salesmen went door-to-door, distributing their cookbooks for free. Touting the dessert as a versatile food, the company saw its sales rise to over $1 million by 1906 |
During the baby boom era, Kellogg's began selling sugary cereal to children. With this change in business model came sociable animal mascots, lively animated commercials and the back of the cereal box as a form of targeted content marketing. This represented a new approach to making a brand memorable with the audience.
In the 1990s, everything changed for marketers. The arrival of computers and the Internet made websites and blogs flourish, and corporations found content marketing opportunities through email.
E-commerce adaptations and digital distribution became the foundation of marketing strategy.
The Internet also helped content marketing become a mainstream form of marketing. Traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, radio and TV started to lose their power in the marketplace. Companies started to promote and sell their products digitally.
The phrase "content marketing" was used as early as 1996, when John F. Oppedahl led a roundtable for journalists at the American Society for Newspaper Editors.
- In 1998, Jerrell Jimerson held the title of "director of online and content marketing" at Netscape.
- In 1999, author Jeff Cannon wrote, "In content marketing, content is created to provide consumers with the information they seek."
By 2014, Forbes Magazine's website had written about the seven most popular ways companies use content marketing. In it, the columnist points out that by 2013, the use of content marketing had jumped across corporations from 60% a year or so before, to 93% as part of their overall marketing strategy. Despite the fact that 70% of organizations are creating more content, only 21% of marketers think they are successful at tracking return on investment.
Today, content marketing has become a powerful model for marketers. Storytelling is part of it, and they must convey the companies' messages or goal to their desired audience without pushing them to just buy the product or service.
Implications
The rise of content marketing has turned many traditional businesses into media publishing companies.For example:
- Red Bull, which sells a high-energy beverage, has published YouTube videos, hosted experiences, and sponsored events around extreme sports and activities like mountain biking, BMX, motocross, snowboarding, skateboarding, cliff-diving, freestyle motocross, and Formula 1 racing. Red Bull Media House is a unit of Red Bull that "produces full-length feature films for cinema and downstream channels." The Red Bulletin is an international monthly magazine Red Bull publishes with a focus on men's sports, culture, and lifestyle.
- Personal finance site Mint.com used content marketing, specifically their personal finance blog MintLife, to build an audience for a product they planned to sell. According to entrepreneur Sachin Rekhi, Mint.com concentrated on building the audience for MintLife "independent of the eventual Mint.com product." Content on the blog included how-to guides on paying for college, saving for a house, and getting out of debt. Other popular content included in-depth interviews and a series of financial disasters called "Trainwreck Tuesdays." The popularity of the site surged as did demand for the product. "Mint grew quickly enough to sell to Intuit for $170 million after three years in business. By 2013, the tool reached 10 million users, many of whom trusted Mint to handle their sensitive banking information because of the blog's smart, helpful content."
For example:
- YouTube, a subsidiary of Google, is an online video platform driving the surge to content marketing. As of 2016, YouTube had over 1 billion users, representing 1/3 of all internet users and reaching more people 18–34 years of age than any cable provider in the U.S.
- Yelp, an online business directory, has seen 30% year over growth in the number of reviews, ending the second quarter of 2016 with 108 million reviews for over 3 million businesses.
Part of transitioning to a media publishing mindset requires a change in structure and process to create content at "the speed of culture." Marketing content production is transforming from an advertising agency model to a newsroom model, according to one consultant.
Common metrics
Metrics to determine the success of content marketing are often tied to the original goals of the campaign.For example, for each of these goals, a content marketer may measure the different engagement and conversion metrics:
Brand awareness and visibility
Businesses focused on expanding their reach to more customers will want to pay attention to the increase in the volume of visitors, as well as the quality of those interactions. Traditional measures of volume include the number of visitors to a page and number of emails collected, while time spent on page and click-through to other pages/ photos are good indicators for engagement.- Number of visitors to a page
- Time spent on the page
- Click-through across pages/ photos
- Number of emails collected
Brand health metrics
Measures in this part comprise
- Share of voice is the number of times a brand has been talked versus its competitors. Outside the digital world, SOV stands for the space and frequency a brand advertisement is placed on traditional media.
- Sentiment is when the brand has positive, negative or neutral feedback.
- Brand Influence refers to the number of times a post, comment or tweet is shared on different platforms.
Diversified user base
- Demographics of visitors
- Sources of traffic
- Differences in buying patterns and user-behavior of visitors
Sales
- Conversion through the sales process, including click-through-rates at each stage of the conversion funnel
- Time spent on the page
- Re-engagement
- Click-through across product pages