What is content marketing: explanation and examples

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a technique for creating relevant and valuable content that is used to attract, recruit and relate to a defined target audience, with the goal of generating more customers and creating customer brand engagement and customer loyalty (Lou & Xie, 2021).

So content marketing is not just an online marketing tool. The Internet has made the tool a lot more effective, though.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is important tool for businesses because of its impact on customer engagement, brand awareness and SEO. By creating valuable and relevant content, you can build a relationship with your target audience, gain their trust and strengthen your position as an authority in your industry. Content marketing goes beyond simply promoting; it's about sharing information that helps your audience, keeps them engaged and ultimately leads to higher conversion rates.

What type of content is there?

The type of content published can vary, from blog posts, white papers, case studies, videos, photos or articles. However, it is important that content marketing should not be seen as a piece of text or message that the company creates for customers. Content should be interesting and interactive, and an important part of content is to allow customers to interact and provide feedback through various channels in the funnel (Pulizzi, 2014).

What is good content?

Järvinen & Taiminen (2016) concluded that generating high-quality content is an ongoing learning process where content is constantly evaluated to create engagement with the target audience. First, the design of the content must meet customer needs. A key element regarding high-quality content is that it creates value for customers rather than just promoting the company's products and services. Good content does not focus on products, but rather focuses on helping customers solve their problems and providing advice on issues customers may be unsure about. In other words, the content produced by the company may not even mention the company or its products, but focuses purely on a particular topic in which the company is an expert. So this means that the company should be aware of the information needs of its customers for creating valuable and relevant content. This can be done in practice by collecting customer feedback and monitoring social media.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Of course, writing good content does not come without benefits. When you focus on writing good content as a business, you will undoubtedly start to benefit.

• Reaching new users: By writing content that answers users' questions, you can attract new users who want to read more information on a particular topic. Users who are satisfied after reading your article can become long-term customers of your company.
• Good for search engine rankings (SEO): Google and other search engines try to answer searchers' questions as best they can by putting the best content at the top of search results. By writing and publishing good content, this will be picked up by Google and you will also rise in rankings.
• Building customer relationships: As users interact with your content that is valuable to them, you can develop a lasting relationship with them. In this way, you can build an "authority" for questions on a particular topic.
• Long-term: Most companies use search engine advertising (SEA) and social ads to increase reach, leads and sales. The big disadvantage is that this is temporary, once the campaigns are no longer active the reach and therefore leads and sales drop. The advantage of content marketing is that it lasts forever and retains its value as long as the findability, relevance and quality are present. You can ensure this by checking the article periodically for updates.

Content marketing in social media

Marketers use social media to promote their brand name to enhance brand awareness and customer loyalty. In doing so, marketers use various tactics to encourage the target audience to interact with the company's posts and thereby also increase popularity (Swani, Milne, Brown, Assaf & Donthu, 2017). What makes social media important for content marketing is that consumers use it in their search for information, comparing products and offerings, and building relationships with sellers. Therefore, social media should be used continuously to inform customers throughout the sales process. In addition, it increases the sales team's ability to help customers. Moreover, it increases the sales team's ability to help the customer by improving the information exchange between the company and the consumer, which in turn improves customer satisfaction.(Agnihotri, Dingus, Hu & Krush, 2016).

Best practices content marketing in social media

Companies might consider the following best practices when creating content marketing in social media:

1. Content that helps you engage customers: share news about testing a new product; share stories about community involvement; generate surveys on relevant topics.
2. Content that allows companies to discover customer needs: tweet about an application under development to get feedback and ideas; create polls for customers to vote and comment on proposed changes.
3. Content that highlights the company's offerings: share success stories on Facebook; start an informative YouTube channel; tweet about promotions and loyalty rewards.
4. Content that helps complete the sale: talk one-on-one with customers to work on business obstacles; create blog posts to talk about known problems or complaints about products and services.
5. Follow-up services and practices: analyze your followers and identify prospects; ask for reviews; announce a new product.

Content marketing examples

That it makes sense for a guitar store to blog about maintaining your instrument, that makes sense. Just like it makes sense for a bank to offer an online household book.

That foundation is definitely a good starting point for most websites. But it's also fun to take a look at how creative some brands can be when it comes to content marketing.

Like Coca Cola, which printed on its labels the most popular names by country. The result? Millions of people shared photos online of the bottles with their names on them and tagged friends whose names they came across.

We've already told you that content marketing is not just online marketing, to give a fun example we'll go to France and back in time more than 100 years:

Originally Michelin was a manufacturer of bicycle tires with the dream of expanding into car tires. At the time, however, cars were complete novelties and there were only 3,000 cars driving around all over France. People didn't really know anything about cars back then, except that you could take your family to the picnic. People had no idea where they could go outside the known local areas. You could fill a book in those days with everything people didn't know about cars and what you could do with them: where to buy gasoline, how to change your car tire, where to find a garage, where to stay overnight, you name it. The Michelin brothers understood people's demand and responded brilliantly, they came up with a book: Michelin Guide. As the cover proclaimed, it was a free 400-page guide for drivers in France that answered all these questions and more. The first edition was printed more than 35,000 times even though there were only 3,000 cars in France. By creating the guide, demand for cars - and with it, car tires - soared. Soon the book sold in surrounding countries and expanded to 600 pages by 1920. In 1910, they also created the Michelin Map for motorists, which was so good that it was still used by soldiers during World War II. In 1926, the Michelin brothers expanded the book to include restaurant ratings. Five years later, they came up with an official rating system of one, two or three stars for restaurants that are still known today. Chefs try tremendously hard to get a spot in the Michelin Guide, the bible of dining guides.

What content do you already have?

Often a content marketing plan is created because people are not satisfied with their current content. That doesn't mean you created that content for nothing. In fact, there is often room for it in your new content strategy.

Therefore, carefully map out what content you already have. For example, which content fits well within your new strategy? But do not immediately push aside the content that does not quite fit in.

Can't you perhaps expand this content to achieve better quality? Or could you perhaps merge several small articles into one larger and stronger whole?

Getting new ideas

Developing new ideas is perhaps the most fun part of your content marketing plan. In case creativity doesn't take off right away, here are a few handy online tools:

Answerthepublic.com: on this site, you enter a search term. The tool then brings up all the questions surrounding that topic. These are based on questions that search engine users enter. Exactly the questions your target audience wants answered.

Buzzsumo.com: this paid tool shows you what content is doing well around a particular topic. You can see how many shares an item has received and on which platforms. A good indicator of what type of content the target audience likes within a particular topic.

Planning and monitoring

With all those new ideas in your pocket, the next step is to plan them properly. You do this with the help of a content calendar. This is where you plan all the content and ensure a good distribution of the different types of content.

Finally, it is important to monitor the performance of your content. The lessons you learn from this are, in turn, important input for further honing your content marketing plan.

Resources

Agnihotri, R., Dingus, R., Hu, M.Y., & Krush, M.T. (2016). Social media: Influencing customer satisfaction in B2B sales. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, 172-180.

Järvinen, J., & Taiminen, H. (2016). Harnessing marketing automation for B2B content marketing. Industrial Marketing Management, 54, 164-175.

Lou, C., & Xie, Q. (2021). Something social, something entertaining? How digital content marketing augments consumer experience and brand loyalty. International Journal of Advertising, 40(3), 376-402.

Pulizzi, J. (2014). Epic Content Marketing - How to tell a different story, break through the clutter, and win more customers by marketing less. McGraw Hill.

Swani, K., Milne, G.R., Brown, B.P., Assaf, A.G., & Donthu, N. (2017). What messages to post? Evaluating the popularity of social media communications in business versus consumer markets. Industrial Marketing Management, 62, 77-87.