“Content is king.”
That phrase gets thrown around a lot these days. I’m probably guilty of saying it once or twice myself.
There’s nothing wrong with it, in theory. It just doesn’t tell us very much.
“Content” can mean anything that’s designed to present information to an audience. It could be content on your website, a YouTube video, or a TV advertisement, to name a few.
Content itself isn’t new, and on its own, is often unremarkable (the instruction manual for your new microwave for instance, is a type of content, but you wouldn’t go and show it off to your friends).
It’s when this content is used for marketing and becomes “content marketing” that it tends to take on a different, and much more exciting form.
Put simply, “content marketing” is any content that’s created and used for the purpose of marketing something. In this article I’m going to focus on online content. This will generally mean content that lives on your blog or within your articles section. It could consist of anything from an article to an infographic or a video.
Whatever form it takes – it’s seriously valuable.
Why?
Because it’s competitive out there – especially in Ecommerce. If you want your brand to stand out, if you want to grow your audience, if you want to gain links that will help you climb the search results so you can benefit from a consistent stream of free traffic to your site – then you need content marketing.
Thankfully, getting started with content marketing probably isn’t as difficult – or expensive – as you might think.
So how much do you think it takes to execute an effective content marketing strategy?