Content Marketing: What It Is and Why You Need It!

Content marketing might be a term you’ve heard tossed about lately, but still may not know exactly what it means for your small business. To put it simply, content marketing is the practice of creating, collecting, and making available fresh content for one’s readers. This may come in various forms, including blog posts, articles, whitepapers, short reports, videos, podcasts, ebooks, social media and more. We live in an age that treasures information, and the more you can present your readers with the greater authority you will hold in their eyes, which can often bring about better rankings, increased traffic, links, and sales.

Content marketing is getting ever more popular!

According to BusinessBolts.com, this year some 74 percent of businesses plan to do an increased level of content marketing. Only 4 percent are not. Many reasons exist for this, among them cost-effectiveness, near-instant results and control over the medium. With content marketing you can shape your message, control the flow, and utilize many different mediums to get your content to your market. For instance, an article or blog post could be written, posted on your site, excerpted in social media, made into a video or audio and social bookmarked across the web. Repurposing your content for various platforms is the order of the day. In addition, this can happen quite often, and an entire content marketing campaign can be realized quite swiftly.

Want an example of how content marketing made a difference?

The New York Times recently profiled a Northern Virginia company, River Pools and Spas, that was watching as their sales tanked because of the housing recession of 2008. Orders shrank from six per month ($50,000 a pop) to less than two. What had been a $250,000 yearly spend on radio, TV and pay per click advertising, was now out of the question. Instead, owner Marcus Sheridan went on an ambitious content marketing campaign consisting of blog posts and videos, and in just a short time had not only recovered but surpassed pre-recession levels. In fact, Sheridan attributes nearly $2 million in sales to a SINGLE article he wrote on how much a fiberglass pool should cost!

Content marketing can and should be a major part of your online marketing strategy for 2013. The good news is that it’s all within your control!