What is Content Marketing?
What is content marketing?
It is a marketing strategy that involves publication, content creation and distribution of content to target audiences. It is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relatable and consistent content. It is with a purpose to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience. Ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Let’s recall what our teachers taught us back in school about the 4 Ws and 1 H.
Who. Where. When. What. How.
Apply these 5 to content marketing.
Who to Show?
Your Target Audience.
First of all, what is target audience?
It is a particular group at which a product such as a film or advertisement is aimed which means the kind of customers that you want to sell your products/services to.
Who the heck are your target audiences?
How do you identify your target audience?
Have an online platform for your business (whichever you are comfortable with). LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. Post your content consistently for a month and, monitor your data and analytics. Collect your one month results and identify which type of people often look and engage on your page.
Here are some of the things to identify:
Gender. Job. Location. Devices used. Age.
Where to show?
Whichever social platform you are comfortable with
Top 5 Social Media platforms for Content Marketing :
It is commonly used to connect with family and friends with many features such as uploading a picture/video, liking posts, messaging other people and many more. Its purpose is to make the world more open and connected.
As at 31 March 2020, Facebook has at least 1.6 billion daily users which is a 12% increase in statistics from December 2019. 80% of them are consumers/buyers.
Instagram has similar features with Facebook but it has more engagements among the users. It has 500 million daily users with 10.7% social referral share. 80% of Instagram users are buyers too. (We are part of that 80% whoops hehe)
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform. It is a platform where business people come get leads while building relationships with other business people online. Aside from that, some users are on LinkedIn to look for jobs. It has more than 600 million active users. Through this platform, 663.3 million users were reached through ads and 80% of them are B2B Leads.
Side track: What is B2B Leads?
B2B lead generation involves attracting and collecting potential leads from prospective customers. You can solicit leads in numerous ways, from cold calling to social media.
This is where users “let loose”. What do we mean by let loose? Twitter is all about relatability. If your tweets are not relatable, they won’t go viral.
Twitter users tweet their emotions/opinions out and most of the time, other users could relate to those kind of tweets and them retweeting the post, it basically tells the person “Hey, I agree with you. I’ll retweet that”
Below are some examples. Can you relate to any of them?
Twitter is also the #1 platform for new discoveries. There are a lot of life hacks videos in Twitter and yes, those tweets got popular among twitter users. Twitter has 134 million daily users with 23% of Ads engagement.
Youtube
YouTube is an entertainment network. It has 70% engagement between users and creators such as liking, commenting and sharing the video content.
It is also the 2nd most preferred video platform after Netflix. Most of the users discover new brands/products through YouTube.
Out of the 5 platforms mentioned ere, which platform are you most comfortable with and which platform suits your content marketing?
When to show your content?
It’s simple. Analyse.
Post your contents for a month daily and check your daily audience engagements such as which day and time are your audiences most active? It depends on each individual.
Below are the ideal number of times you should post on each platform.
LinkedIn - 1 time per day
Facebook - 1 time per day
Twitter - 3 to 5 tweets per day
Instagram - 1 time per day
YouTube - 2 times per month
What content do you show?
Well, ask yourself. What is your message?
Your content depends on what message do you wish to bring across to your audience. Here are the different types of content marketing:
Blogging
Video
Podcasts
Infographics
Email
Ebooks
Advertisements
Live Video Streams
Carousel Posts
Radio
Magazines
Newspapers
Flyers
Events
If your content theme is Lifestyle,
you can create Blogs, Video Content and Podcasts.
If your content theme is Food,
you can create picture contents to make your audience drooling just by looking at pictures of the food. Videos are ideal too like vlogging.
If your content theme is Business,
you can share your business knowledge through Live Streams, Carousels, Video Content and Podcasts.
Hence, in order to know what content do you upload, you have to know what is your them and what is the message you want to bring across to your audience.
How to show your content?
Connect. Socialise. Engage.
Firstly, create a color palette with a series of colours to represent your brand. Play around with these colors and use it in the content for your audience. Make sure to keep your design concepts consistent too.
Once that is settled, upload the contents that are engaging to your audience. The created contents should invite a reaction from your audience; Be it Good or Bad.
With every post, always tell them to like and share the posts. That is what we call “Call-To-Action”. This will help grow your audience organically.
Connect and socialize with your audience. This does not only mean waiting for someone to comment on your posts. It also means that you should socialize with your followers by commenting on their posts too. It helps you publicize your company name at the same time.
We have already gone through a quick brief of what is content marketing. When creating content, be sure to practise the 4Ws and 1H (also to let our teachers feel proud of their work for teaching us in school).
