What is Content Marketing? What’s Your Strategy?

In the SEO realm, the phrase “content is king” is thrown around a lot.  But what exactly does that mean?  Content isn’t just text, an article, or blog post.  Content can be anything that’s designed to deliver information to an audience...videos, infographic, reviews, photos, how-tos, etc.

But what is content marketing?  

Content marketing is this same created content (videos, infographic, reviews, photos, how-tos, etc.) made with the intent of marketing something...a business, a service, a product, etc.  Whatever form this content takes, it’s valuable.  It’s a competitive world out there, and if you want a brand that stands out over the rest, it’s going to take this creative content to get you there.

Getting started with content marketing is relatively easy and not as expensive as one might think.  While over half of companies claim that budget constraints limit their content marketing success, we can’t help but think that’s a poor excuse for coming up with some kind of content marketing strategy.

Believe it or not, outsourcing for content production can be money well spent.  Because creating content can be time-consuming when created in-house or by yourself, outsourcing allows your business to focus on what it’s good at.

If you’re new to outsourcing, consider using a few trial tools to find the right source for what you need.  Here are a two that we like:

Brainstorming

Buzzsumo is a fantastic resource to use for content inspiration.  It’s as simple as entering the topic you’re looking to create content about.  The results show the top-performing content for the topic you’ve searched for.  With these insights you can determine what content has been successful for others in the past, and how you can create something similar, but better.

Design

Canva is an incredible and free tool that helps even the most lacking in experience, create great visual content.

Content doesn’t sell itself.

You could create the greatest content in the world, but if you’re not promoting your content, it’s not doing your brand any favors.  Derek Halpern, founder of Social Triggers, encourages the 80/20 rule: Spending 20% of time creating content, 80% promoting it.  This, specifically, is a great strategy for companies who have a lower budget for their content marketing strategy.  By cutting back on the volume of your work, but spending more time reaching out to influencers with that content, you can make your dollars stretch.  A best practice would be reaching out to the people you’ve featured in your content to let them know you’ve referenced them in your most current content.  Chances are they’ll share the post resulting in more visitors and social shares.

In conclusion, content marketing is extremely effective, even on a smaller budget.  Build a team you trust (in-house or outsourced), streamline your process, and promote it.

Are you looking to create a content marketing strategy?  At Monstrous Media Group it’s one of our specialties.  Contact us today and we’ll put you in touch with our Content Media Strategist! {contact-form}