Content Marketing: A How-To Guide

If you have a product or service and are looking to make it available over the internet, then that means you need to be involved in digital marketing. Every digital agency in Tampa will tell you that when it comes to digital marketing, content is king. Having great content can transform customers into brand amplifiers and advocates, making them even more valuable than simply being consumers.

Curious to learn how? Read on for more information. But first, what is content marketing anyway?

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a segment of digital marketing that has to do with the generation of high-value, educational, or entertaining content designed to engage, delight, and inform a brand’s target market.

Content forms for content marketing campaigns can be varied and diverse: video posts, live streaming, blogging, podcasts, and social media posting can all be considered forms of content marketing. The forms that brands choose are often only limited by their willingness to spend on the production of these pieces of content.

Ideally, these pieces of content are engaging and interesting enough to compel consumers to reshare them, encouraging the phenomenon of content virality. In this way, content consumers are converted from simply being consumers of a brand into advocates for it, sharing the brand’s message to their circle of influence, whether on social media, email, or other various digital channels.

Step One: Establish a Blog

The simplest, most basic step that any brand can take in their content marketing journey is to establish a blog. This accomplishes several things. First, this step allows brands to quickly and easily establish a channel to talk to its market about brand-specific concerns. Product updates and changes, as well as industry trends and information, can be used as topics for blog posts.

The other aspect that maintaining a corporate blog helps with is more technical and has to do with search engine optimization, known in digital marketing like SEO. This is the way marketers optimize websites to get them to rank higher on the results pages of the top search engines. How this is done is often a multistep process, but one of them is by having regularly updated, fresh content. Maintaining a corporate blog is a convenient way to do this.

Step Two: Engage Over Social Media

Once a brand’s website has been optimized, and a blog has been established, brands can begin to engage with their target market over social media. Usually, this involves building a brand page, then aggressively promoting it, and buying ad space for it. Choosing the appropriate social media channel to engage in is also part of this step.

Unlike corporate blogs, which allow brands to speak to their market about specific concerns, social media pages are spaces for brands to dialog with their market. Consumers can deliver quick feedback and opinions about a brand’s product or service, and today’s best brands should be able to identify valuable customer insights, perceptions, and feedback. They should then use this information to modify their current products, design new ones, or make changes as needed.