What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is giving congruent content to your desired target audience to drive interest in your organization through planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts).
Content marketing is not about promoting your products, your brand, or your organization. It is about giving your audience information/content that will be useful, brings value, is relevant, and consistent to attract and retain customers or donors.
Content marketing is educating your audience and solving their pain points and challenges.
Why do Content Marketing?
Creating free quality content for your audiences is a great way to combat the distractions on social media and build a relationship with them.
As an organization, doing content marketing can help you with:
- improving brand awareness
- connecting and engaging with your target audience
- building brand loyalty
- owning your own media/content instead of borrowing from other organizations
- improving your social media strategy
- helping your SEO ranking by producing unique, quality content
- addressing issues your audience cares about rather than just promoting your organization
- driving traffic and leads to your organization
How to do Content Marketing
First, you will want to decide on the type of content you will create. Start thinking about your target audience and some of the following questions…
- What does your audience need from you?
- What challenges are they looking to overcome?
- Why does your audience need your organization?
- How can you help them succeed?
Then, let’s take a look at the different types of content marketing you can utilize.
Below are some of the most popular options.
- Social Media Content Marketing
With over 3.7 billion users on social media globally, it’s easy to understand why so many organizations invest in social media content marketing. There are a number of platforms (such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube to name a few) to work with and several ways you can create and share social media content on each of them (like photos, videos, live videos, and stories).
Tip: A great way to create and organize your social media content is by using a content calendar. Also, consider boosting your posts or doing some paid media to get new eyes on your content!
- Blog Content Marketing
Blogs are a great way to share information with your target audience and can be used to show credibility, raise awareness, and convert readers into customers or donors.
Tip: A great way to set up your blog is on your website and have your social and email drive traffic to it. Make sure you have links to your social media pages, have keywords throughout your blog, as well as a link to contact you for more information.
- Video Content Marketing
With almost 5 billion…yes BILLION videos being watched on YouTube alone every single day — having video content marketing is an excellent way to reach your audience.
With video content marketing you can get a lot of information to your audience in just a few minutes and it will increase overall engagement.
You can make some great how-to videos, share information, or even stories of impact about your organization.
Tip: Be sure to share your videos across all channels of communication — social media, email, and your website.
- Podcast Content Marketing
First of all…did you know that there are over 103 million monthly podcast listeners in the U.S.? That is a huge market you don’t want to miss out on.
Creating and producing podcasts improves credibility, builds connections and relationships with your audience, and is a great way to promote your organization.
However, in order to pull this off, you need to make sure you have enough content to consistently produce podcasts and the right person that will hold your audience’s attention and communicate well.
Tip: In order to get started, hire out the production of your podcast (pre-production and pre-planning are the keys to a successful podcast). Make sure you have enough content to consistently produce podcasts.
Effective content marketing can have a great ROI, increase engagement, grow awareness, build relationships, and bring in new customers and donors.
We know content marketing can sound scary and overwhelming. If you are running a smaller business or organization, you might not have the resources to put into all this effort, but it’s easier than it sounds. All it takes to get started is planning ahead and a solid team to keep the plan moving forward.
We would love to see you succeed, so let us help you today! If you need help planning or need a team to run point on your marketing efforts, consider IMMIX Marketing. We would love to partner with you!