What Is Content Marketing?

This blog post is happily borrowed from our Medium series.

Not many people understand quite well what Content Marketing is all about. OK, some do understand that it involves information but they do not really understand where it really fits in within the Marketing department. So here we go. This is will be a rather short but succinct explanation of it.

Understand this about Content Marketing: it’s not about selling your business’ products but rather to inform or educate your target audience. Yes. No selling. No “Click here to buy product X” or creating entire an article about how your Service X is better than the rest in the market. All that will come later. What content marketing involves is education; educating your audience about something. Hence the word “Content” in it. For example, instead of promoting your cleaning product X blatantly you could teach your users how the chemical ingredient in cleaning agent X breaks down oil stains. Or you could tell them how to clean something. If you consistently build this wealth of knowledge you’ll end up building a highly-targeted audience and client base for your products.

Content Marketing can get you that targeted audience that other forms of Marketing can’t. But it takes time to see the results.

Where Did Content Marketing Come From?

Content Marketing has been around for a long time. Remember the magazines that your car dealership used to give out to its clients? Mercedes Benz had such magazines that had little stories about the history of the automobile from the days of Karl Benz, Maybach and Daimler. That was content marketing before it was really called that.

With the advent of the Internet and the highly competitive nature of business online, the need to attract customers has become even greater. Ads, promos, competitions still work but they need a greater capital outlay to run. Also many people are coming online not to be sold to but to search for information. Note that. This clearly presents some misalignment with the aims of Traditional Marketing. So how do you grab that surfer’s attention? Give them what they are searching for: information. And that’s where Content Marketing got it’s importance.

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