Content Marketing Demystified

Content marketing not done properly may as well not be done at all! For it will not give you the final product you want: revenue.

It’s like only being able to make cake batter and never having the complete cake to sell to your customers.

It is costly, and time-consuming, but it looks busy and productive, yet it is not at all productive.

Let’s reaffirm the actual reason we are doing content marketing in the first place. It is not to just ‘get the word out’, or to ‘raise awareness’ or to get email addresses. Your content marketing must must must have a practical and clear process which results in revenue for your company.

Now that we have established why you are doing content marketing (creating revenue), let’s look at some of the types of approaches you can take, these are just three of the main ones:

• Article based
• Video based
• E-book, tool, etc

There are others, such as pod-casts, but for this article let’s just look at these three.

 

Articles

In this case you are making SUPERB articles on a REGULAR basis and BROADLY promoting them across the web. It is not a 300 word article you just pump out and get over with so you can get back to your link building campaign. You actually have to make something AWESOME. This is what real content marketing is. Any articles less than AWESOME are not content marketing and are ‘filler content’.

Don’t create filler content and think you are a content marketer.

 

Videos

This can be more time-consuming than articles (or not in some cases). The quality of your sound and camera are unimportant. The quality of your video itself is of the utmost importance. Don’t let the idea that you need a sound-proofed room and fancy gear to make successful videos.

Your video does however have to either be one or more of the following:

• VERY interesting
• VERY funny
• VERY cute
• VERY strange/weird
• VERY useful

In addition to the video being awesome, you also have to create one on a weekly or bi-weekly basis at the least, and continue to do this for at least 18 months.

 

E-book/Tool

The last two forms of content (articles, and videos) have to be created on a weekly basis, month in, month out, for years. However an Ebook or Tool is simply created once and then PROMOTED consistently, over and over. It can be ‘an ultimate guide to ****’, or it can be a nifty online tool that does something very useful, for absolutely free, which brings in traffic. A considerable amount of time goes into this type of content marketing, you could spend weeks on planning and months on development, but in the end you will have an amazing product which will be your ambassador for promoting your business.

 

Promotion

It is never enough just to make your awesome content. You have to promote it, with free and paid promotion methods. You would take your very best article or your very best video, and use that as the main piece of content that you promote across the web.

Promotion is one of the most important parts in your content marketing strategy. If you want your content to go viral it will need a boost, and that is where paid promotion comes in. This could be simply using Google Ads, or a content distribution service like Outbrain.