Growing up, you were probably blown away by the intelligent, creative and impactful marketing campaigns. They were engraved in your memory, and so, you decided to choose a career in marketing. You chose wisely. But while you may have a solid grip on what’s going on in the marketing world, things do tend to get a little fuzzy. You can find yourself astray amidst the nebulous facts about each marketing pillar. One such victim of said fuzziness is content marketing.
The core of content marketing is simple and clear: you communicate a message in a specific way and at a certain time that will make it mean something to your target audience. Eventually, you sway your target audience to uphold a certain perception or perform a specific action as a calculated result of this communication. Now that the core of content marketing is out of the way, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and outline three important facts you should always keep in mind when playing the wonderful game of content marketing.
Content marketing does not irrefutably mean copywriting. They’re best friends, but not one and the same.
Via Tumblr
Think of content marketing as the house and copywriting as the master bedroom. The house can’t function without the master bedroom and the master bedroom can’t exist without the house. Sure, they can often overlap in their purposes and values they offer, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. The same goes for content marketing and copywriting. Content marketing is the message you plan to communicate, copywriting is the words you will use to present your message to the public.
If you don’t have a content marketing strategy, you might as well call it quits.
Via Business Insider
When you think of a friend to call in a crisis, who do you think of? I haven’t stalked you enough to have a copy of your friend list just yet, but I’m going to take a wild guess and assume it’s the friend with a long-standing track record of words and actions that constantly prove they are reliable, consistent and true to their word. That’s what a content marketing strategy will do for you – it will wrap your head around how exactly you want people to perceive your brand and keep all your marketing efforts on one path to achieve this distinct perception. People will adopt an image about your brand and stick with it, maybe that your brand is always innovative or that it cares enough to put the customer before the business, point is, the perception will last. Remember, you’re selling the value you provide to your end user, not the product or service itself – that’s what generates a withstanding perception.
It’s not one post or one article or one video. It’s an entire customer journey.
Via Entrepreneur
There’s a marketing trap many great marketers have fallen into once or twice in their career, it’s called the “being too product-centric” trap. You get so focused on your product that day in and day out you find yourself stuck in a bubble, unable to think about anything other than your mighty product. Thing is, your customers don’t care about your product as much as you do; it’s simply a source of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. So, it’s your responsibility to understand your target customer’s thought process, daily routine, habits, values, quirks and challenges. Once you’ve done that, you’ll realize that in order to really send a message with an impact, you have to make your product or service relevant during every step of your customer’s journey, from awareness to endorsement. One video can go viral and make your brand rolling on the tongues of thousands, but if you don’t build on it and keep people coming back for more through every step of the journey, you’ve only nailed yourself 15 minutes of fame and not a minute more.
