What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage your target audience. The primary goal of content marketing is to build brand awareness, establish authority, nurture customer relationships, and ultimately drive profitable customer actions, such as purchases or subscriptions.

Content marketing
key elements

In today's digital landscape, businesses are recognizing the power of content, including web pages, social media posts, blog posts, and other communication. The purpose: to engage, educate, and convert your target audience.

Let’s explore some of the key elements and concepts related to content marketing.

Content creation

Content can take various forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, social media posts, and more. Your content should be tailored to the preferences and needs of your target audience, and provide value.

Audience targeting

To be effective with your content marketing, you must first identify and understand your target audience's demographics, interests, values, and pain points. This information helps you create content that resonates with them.

Value and relevance

Content should provide value to your audience. It should answer questions, solve problems, or entertain. By offering valuable information and solutions, content marketing builds trust and helps you to establish your business as a credible authority in your industry.

Relevant content can also spark conversations and interactions, creating a more meaningful connection between your brand and your audience.

Consistency

Regularly publishing content is essential for keeping your audience engaged and returning for more. Consistency in tone, style, and messaging also contributes to brand identity. To stay consistent, you’ll need to have some guides that everyone in your company can adhere to.

Distribution

Once you create content, you need to promote it through various channels, such as your website, social media, email marketing, and maybe even through paid advertising. Effective distribution ensures your content reaches its intended audience.

When you reach the right people with the right content, it can save you money on paid ads as content marketing often yields better results compared to traditional advertising, providing a higher return on investment.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Improve your visibility in search results by optimizing your content for search engines. Quality content that addresses users' queries and needs enhances search engine visibility, leading to higher organic traffic — and potential customers.

To be effective, you’ll need to do some keyword research, understand how your competitors are driving traffic, etc. You’ll also need to pay attention to your metadata. Metadata includes your title tag, meta description, keywords, tags, and headers.

Measuring and analytics

To evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts, you should track key performance metrics such as website traffic, engagement (likes, shares, comments), conversion rates, and customer retention. There are a variety of tools available to track these metrics.

Lead generation and conversion

Content marketing can be used at various stages of the customer journey, from awareness and consideration to conversion and retention. It can help generate leads, nurture prospects, and convert them into customers.

Well-crafted content continues to provide value long after it's published, contributing to sustained brand awareness and lead generation.

Customer relationship building

Content marketing doesn't end after a sale. It can also be used to maintain and strengthen customer relationships by providing ongoing support, educational content, and updates. As you educate customers about products, services, and industry trends, you empower them to make informed decisions. When you’ve already built trust, they’ll find it easier to turn to you, because you’re the one keeping them informed.

When you keep customers engaged after a sale, you begin to build brand ambassadors — people who talk about your brand because they trust you.

Content marketing strategies

Effective content marketing requires a well-planned strategy, a deep understanding of your target audience, and consistent effort over time. When executed properly, content marketing can be a cost-effective way to build brand loyalty and drive business growth.

Why content marketing is important

Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing relevant content to a pre-defined audience. Unlike traditional advertising, which often interrupts consumers, content marketing aims to provide genuine value by offering information, entertainment, or solutions that align with the audience's interests and needs.

Instead of interrupting consumers in the form of an ad, well-crafted content is served in response to search engine queries and in social media posts. It’s the valuable information that people seek out as a means to find solutions to specific problems or pain points.

Done well, content marketing helps to establish trust and credibility, driving profitable customer action, and ultimately turning those customers into brand ambassadors — because they’ve come to really like your brand.

How content marketing works

An effective content marketing strategy creates a seamless and engaging experience for a specified audience — designed to guide them through disparate channels or sites to specific solutions.

Let’s break that down. To create a successful strategy, you need to:

1. Know your audience

Content marketing begins with a deep understanding of your target audience's preferences, pain points, values, and motivations. This insight informs the creation of content that aligns with their needs.

For example, providing content that feels like it was written by your accountant won’t go very far when marketing baby clothes to expectant mothers. And, writing in rhymes likely won’t resonate with someone seeking legal representation.

2. Create compelling content

Valuable and relevant content should be produced in various formats, catering to different audience preferences. High-quality writing, compelling visuals, and engaging multimedia elements can be crafted to capture attention and deliver value.

In other words, your content shouldn’t feel like it was produced by AI. It should be human and offer real solutions to real problems. Your images and design should feel professional and on par with the expectations of your audience. If you don’t have design or writing experience, please hire someone to help you so you can give your brand the best chance of success.

3. Select your distribution channels

Your content should be strategically distributed across your website and other platforms, such as social media, blogs, podcasts, and more. Each channel should be chosen based on where your target audience spends their time — so you’ll likely specialize in only a few platforms.

Remember, you won’t find much success if you’re running a podcast for people who prefer to consume information through reading, and you won’t engage people who are drawn to Instagram reels if you expect them to read a 5,000 word dissertation on your solution.

4. Encourage engagement and interaction

As your audience consumes your content on social media channels, they engage through likes, shares, comments, and other interactions. This engagement helps to build a sense of community and fosters brand loyalty.

For effective content marketing on social media, make sure you’re taking time to be real and provide valuable insight. You won’t go far if all you do is try and sell something.

5. Provide opportunities to learn more

Share content on your website that you can link to from other content. You want your readers to browse through more than one page or blog post to learn about topics and solutions. Encourage them to learn more each step of the way with valuable articles, blog posts, and other clickable content.

Each step in this journey should lead to more value, more information, and ultimately, the opportunity to purchase, subscribe, or reach out to a representative.

6. Call your audience to take action

Place calls-to-action (CTAs) strategically in each piece of content you produce. A blurb on your homepage could simply say, “learn more” and lead to a deeper dive. Your blog could include a message such as, “don’t miss a post — subscribe.” And a social media post could include a short lead for an article with the CTA, “read more.” Once your audience makes its way down the sales funnel, they’ll be more likely to click the “buy now” button. Always provide a link with your CTA.

Content marketing drives users to take desired actions, such as visiting your website, signing up for newsletters, downloading ebooks, or making purchases. However, people rarely take action if you don’t ask them to do so.

7. Build lasting relationships

Content doesn't stop at conversion. It continues to nurture the customer relationship by providing ongoing value and support, fostering loyalty and advocacy. At this point, content marketing could occur via emails, newsletters, or text messages.

As you provide content to existing customers, make sure they know that you value them. Your customers receive communication from many businesses every day. They need a valid reason to open your email or text, or to return to your website. Just remember, you don’t like to be spammed. Your customers don’t either.

8. Analyze your data and optimize

Content performance can be measured through analytics, and this can help you understand what's working and what needs improvement. Based on these insights, take time to refine your strategies and produce better outcomes.

Master the art of content writing

At the heart of content marketing lies content writing. Creating compelling, informative, and engaging written content is crucial for capturing and retaining your audience's attention. Let’s look at some key elements of effective content writing.

Understand your audience

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. You need to know your audience — their pain points, desires, motivators, and preferences. You can get to know them by understanding what they value. Do they value family, success, fitness, or culture? Find out, then tailor your writing to resonate with their values and needs.

Focus on clarity and structure

Craft well-structured content with clear headings, subheadings, and concise paragraphs. Use bullet points when they’re appropriate to break up big blocks of text. Use long and short paragraphs for visual diversity. A conversational tone helps to make complex topics easily digestible, and contractions help people feel like your content was written by a real human.

Read your content out loud to make sure you’ve eliminated stumbling blocks and to hear whether or not you’ve got a good flow.

Provide value and relevance

Offer genuine value by addressing your audience's questions and providing actionable insights. Ensure your content aligns with their interests. This goes back to knowing your audience.

Tell stories

Storytelling is a powerful element in content writing. Stories help you connect with your audience on a more emotional level, making your content more memorable. Connecting with your audience through stories helps them recognize that there are humans behind your brand who understand their customers’ values and pain points.

As you weave stories into your content, you can help to humanize your brand and create an emotional connection. Stories have the power to engage and inspire, leaving a lasting impact.

Write for website optimization

We talked earlier about SEO, but how do you incorporate relevant keywords naturally? Make sure you’re using the right keywords and that they’re sprinkled lightly through your content. Never resort to keyword stuffing. It makes your brand feel amateur, inconsiderate, and ultimately it’ll hurt your search rankings. Keywords should also be placed strategically in your metadata.

Above all, prioritize readability and user experience over keywords.

Include professional visual elements

Complement your writing with visuals like images, infographics, and videos to enhance understanding and engagement. Make sure you’re consistent in the way you represent your brand in both images and content. Visual element guidelines should be included in your style guide so your entire organization stays consistent with how your brand is represented.

Stay consistent

Maintain a consistent writing style, voice, and tone across your content. This consistency fosters recognition and builds trust with your audience. This includes:

How industry terms are used
Usage of words that can be written multiple ways (wifi, WiFi, wi-fi)
How brand-specific terminology should be communicated
Which words your brand avoids
Whether your headings are title or sentence case
How you use special characters (em dash, ellipses, ampersands)

Again, this information should be included in your style guide.

Edit and proofread

Thoroughly edit and proofread your content to eliminate grammatical errors, typos, and inaccuracies. A polished piece reflects professionalism. A good rule of thumb is to have every piece of content edited and proofread by someone other than the writer. It’s too easy to miss errors when you’re already familiar with the content.

Develop a content marketing strategy

A successful content marketing strategy is built on a solid foundation of research, planning, and execution. Once you know your target audience you can create a content roadmap that outlines topics, formats, and distribution channels. A well-rounded strategy also includes setting clear goals, whether it's increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or nurturing customer relationships.

This roadmap should also connect your pieces of content through internal and external linking — ultimately guiding your potential customers through the buyer journey.

When you create a successful content calendar, you help to ensure a consistent flow of content that resonates with your audience at various stages of their buyer's journey.

Content marketing services

In the ever-expanding digital ecosystem, numerous content marketing services have emerged to help businesses craft and execute marketing campaigns. These services encompass a wide range of offerings, including content creation, distribution, analytics, and optimization. Many of these companies require subscriptions to their services that can run into six-figure expenses within a year. That’s not an expense most small businesses are comfortable with — but it’s a service they need.

Some content companies offer one-off, or a combination of services such as:

Content creation. They may offer to produce one or more content types, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, ebooks, or others. However, this kind of one-off content often gets lost and doesn’t contribute to a larger goal.
Distribution. They may help you share your content across relevant channels such as social media, email marketing, and influencer partnerships — but a company that focuses solely on distribution rarely has a hand in ensuring that the channels will be effective.
Analytics and optimization. While analytics is critical for measuring the effectiveness of content and refining strategies, it’s not a solution in itself. Companies that focus only on analytics and optimization are often out of touch with who you’re marketing to, why your company does what it does, and why it matters. They often only care about traffic — but simply tracking traffic won’t lead to more traffic.

At Alter Ethos, we believe content marketing should be looked at holistically. Everything must be valuable, relevant, and interconnected — and the target customer should be the driving force behind what and how you create.

When you contact Alter Ethos, we’ll help you select the right level of service. We can help you:

Develop style guides or messaging and branding decks
Create effective customer personas
Complete a full analysis of your online presence
Provide you with an action plan that you can follow in-house
Provide a full-service experience to get your web presence noticed

If you really need a one-off piece of content created, we can do that too. We’ll just be sure and ask the right clarifying questions right up front so that piece of content can be an asset for you.

Contact
Alter Ethos

At Alter Ethos, we understand that content holds the power to captivate, educate, and inspire — shaping the way we communicate, connect, and do business in the modern era. As technology continues to evolve, the timeless art of storytelling, enriched by the tools of the digital age, will remain the driving force behind successful content marketing campaigns.

Contact Alter Ethos today to get started.