What is content marketing?
Traditional marketing, consisting of TV ads, print ads, and billboards, has evolved to include digital marketing. However, even though the tools are different, the tactics follow the same pattern. You have your product or service, you create content to promote that product or service, and you monitor the performance of that content (to get more precise, you have different metrics for digital marketing than for TV ads).
Content marketing is when you create content to attract, engage, and educate people about your brand or business. This content could be in the form of a blog post, an infographic, a webinar presentation, or any other form that might make sense for your business.
Why should you care about content marketing?
Let’s say you’re an online marketer for an e-commerce store. You’ve been tasked with generating traffic to the site, and you’ve created several blog posts to do just that. You’ve written a couple of in-house blog articles, done some guest blogging, created a social media strategy, and implemented a retargeting program. You’ve measured the performance of these tactics and defined your benchmark KPIs (key performance indicators), like the number of orders you get each week, the amount of money you made from each individual visit, and the amount of time you spend on each blog post. Great!
You’re happy with the results you’re getting from your digital marketing team and decide it’s time to take your blog to the next level.
What happens if you try to introduce content marketing to your e-commerce team?
They’ll probably tell you that this is not the kind of content they’re looking for. To them, your content is either informative (for customers) or entertaining (for readers). Even when you try to trick them into reading your content by using sensationalism or exaggerated claims, they won’t buy what you’re selling because it’s not informative or entertaining enough.
What should you do about it?
There’s a good chance that, without realizing it, your e-commerce team could be operating under the assumption that online marketing is mostly about attracting as many visitors to your site as possible. While this may be true in the short term, in the long term, your success as an e-commerce store depends on how well you engage with your audience. Since content is always king (or queen), it’s time to fix your e-commerce team’s mindset and teach them that attracting visitors is just the beginning.
This is where \”content marketing\” comes in. If you truly want to succeed as an e-commerce store, you need to replace the word \”attract\” with \”engage\” and \”content\” with \”marketing\”.