INTRODUCTION

Content marketing is more than just a trendy buzz phrase. It’s an effective way to build your brand and business. By reading this book, you’re taking the first important step to seizing an opportunity that is wide open to you.

Before you dive into the world of content marketing, you need to prepare yourself by taking the time to find out how content marketing evolved and what you need to do to create content that drives traffic, conversation, sharing, and ultimately, purchases. In other words, there is more to content marketing than simply publishing words. Set yourself up for success from the start by mastering the fundamentals.

Marketing a business using content isn’t a new concept; however, it has evolved in recent years to mean far more than creating a company brochure filled with overtly promotional messages and images. Today, content marketing focuses on creating content that is meaningful and useful to consumers with promotion taking a backseat to adding value, particularly adding value to the online conversation happening across the social Web.

WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?

A very broad term used to explain marketing strategy and tactics that involve the curation of content and delivery of that content.

The exchange of content from a business to another business or consumer is to achieve one of the following:

• Increased brand awareness
• Obtain a lead
• Build customer satisfaction/retention

The difference between promotion/advertising and content marketing.

Content marketing provides value that is useful or actionable.

Promotion/advertising makes use of content but it’s typically a call to action and doesn’t provide any standalone value.

Types of content that can shape your content marketing

There are four types of content that can be created and used as part of any content marketing campaign , they are:

•Textual (blog posts, articles, even PR)
•Visual (images, such as info-graphics, product shots, and so on)
•Audio (this podcast is an example of audio)
•Video (YouTube, online courses, how to guides, etc. – usually combined with audio)
Types of content marketing
Digital content marketing examples:
•Blog posts & guest posts
•Lead Magnets
•Case studies & whitepapers
•Email marketing (newsletters, drip campaign content) check out session 12 for more on this
•Ebooks
•Podcasts
•Webinars
•Inbound marketing campaigns

When you have finished reading this section please read the attached

Social Media Content Calendar User Guide

Down load the Editorial content template to use to plan your content approach.

INBOUND MARKETING

“is not content marketing, it’s a type of content marketing”
•The terms are often used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be
•Inbound marketing refers to using content to draw customers in by providing content for potential customers to bite on and join the marketing/sales funnels.
•But content marketing, is bigger than inbound marketing and covers many more marketing strategies than just inbound marketing

A quick rundown on inbound marketing as a digital tactic
•Designed to get an email address (or any type of contact information)
•Uses a landing page – designed to be very simple and action oriented
•Delivers a piece of content as an incentive (touched on a couple earlier such as case studies, white papers, how to guides, checklist, etc.)
•Basically lead magnets but relating to the content of the landing page.
•Include a thank you page – deliver the content and potentially up-sell/cross sell
•Should make use of a drip email marketing campaign (again more on that in the last session)
•Uses advertising, and organic efforts through social, to drive traffic to the landing page
•Can, and probably should, make use of re-marketing to those that didn’t convert

Inbound is the way to go for small business
•Inbound marketing, although it takes time to setup, runs on it’s own for the most part thanks to advertising and email marketing automation
•As opposed to blog posts, webinars, and podcasts, the time commitment is much less for inbound campaigns
•So my recommendation for small business owners looking to get into content marketing, is to start with inbound marketing
•Obviously building content on your website is a good idea as well – so feel free to write blog posts whilst your inbound campaigns are running.

At the end of reading this section Read the two articles below

Content Marketing Sales Funnel

5 Steps to a killer Content marketing Strategy and Lead Gen Machine