The most popular digital marketing mantra in recent years has been “Content is King”, and while the mantra itself may be a touch overused, it is by no means inaccurate. Now more than ever it’s incredibly important to create a content marketing strategy and make it your your own unique content marketing strategy if you hope to drive traffic and boost brand awareness from online channels.
This article dives into a bit of background on the recent popularity of content marketing, why you need to develop a content marketing strategy that is unique, and shows you where to find some of the newest strategies to set yourself apart from your competitors.
The History of Content Marketing
The early days of digital marketing are reminiscent of the Wild West: there weren’t many rules put in place, and those who took the biggest risks typically came away with the best results. But as the online channels matured, they realized that though many of the marketers were happy providing thin, uninformative content to their users, that content didn’t really provide the best experience for their users.
The networks needed to adapt. They needed to find a way to encourage all of the brands taking to their sites for advertising to spend time creating content that their audience would actually enjoy reading, and content that would eventually drive users back to their sites. They’ve done this by rewarding the marketers who take the time to come up with fantastic content and by penalizing those that think they can get away with churning out articles that don’t provide anything educational.
As this idea grew in popularity, marketers started to embrace the need to create quality content if they wanted to adapt in the online marketing world. Hence the idea of Content Marketing was born, and it has been increasing in popularity ever since.
Why do you need to create a content marketing strategy and make it your own?
If you want to be favored by the various advertising channels gain visibility online, you’ll need to start creating your own great content. This is typically long-form, educational articles, photos or videos that provide value to your potential customers.
One of the clearest examples of a channel that favors great, long-form content is social media. If you want to get social media shares these days it’s incredibly important to spend a solid amount of time creating great materials. This report–generated by BuzzSumo–shows Adweek’s average social media shares by length of content.
You can see that their articles containing between 3000 and 10000 words outperform the rest of their content by a significant margin–providing evidence that the more well thought out articles perform better.
Another example of advertising channels advocating great content is SEO. Many people who know about SEO have heard about the Google Panda update. This was a major update to Google’s algorithm that penalized all sites producing weak, or thin content from appearing high in their search results. Google, in their constant quest to create enough informative content to answer all of the world’s questions, absolutely favors in-depth content.
How Can You Create Your Own Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing is no longer a big secret, and there is a good chance that your competition is already taking full advantage of it to scoop up your potential clients. So if you want to get some of the newest, most actionable strategies, check out this upcoming webinar hosted by Scoop.it and Sprout Social.
(3 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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Thanks for the write-up, Mike. I agree that you need a content marketing strategy for curation but you really want to face the dilemma that pops up. Thing is, curating stuff makes sense and adds value if you re-work it somehow, such as adding you take on the topic, etc. The more value you add to the curated piece, the more chances there are that you may start thinking that you could just create your own blog post or what not rather than adding value to somebody’s work. The only con to that sort of approach is that if you… Read more »
Slight problem with this in the respect it lacks real world application – sales are difficult enough to acquire as is, if they have to be backed up with “wait three months until we figure out how your business works”, the standard response will simply be: “no thanks”.
The process and strategy is great, but it neglects the pressures of the real world. Further to this, it also presume that the client has an existing customer base – circa 40% of our high value clients are start ups.
Not sure I disagree @@disqus_1znj5GA86L:disqus but I think what @@vitaliyokolos:disqus was highlighting is that there is a learning effect ongoing with using curation as part of your content marketing mix. Yes, you can’t tell a CxO or a client “wait until we figure it out”. In our approach, the best way to build a content marketing strategy is to start by listing questions prospects and clients have and then start publishing content that answers these questions. In that process, we’ve found it’s not just ok but also very efficient to focus on creating some of these answers while simply using… Read more »
I guess that John is saying that to institute any substantial change that would take more than hours would be a non starter. But substantial change does take time to figure it out to determine what works better and how it should be deployed effectively. Moving to a new more effective process does not mean that existing activities should be stopped until the new thing is in place. Good planning and development are required for those things that are not currently instinctive for both the management and operations people. However, the behavior of the market continues to change and some… Read more »