What is content marketing?
Content marketing shares informative content that is relevant, interesting, and useful to your target audience.
There are four forms of content:
- Written word
- Audio
- Video
- Images
We mainly talk about writing, audio, and video here on Copyblogger, so we’ll go through each of those different kinds of content later in this post.
The most important thing to remember is that it’s your job to be useful. There’s no point in creating any content if your audience doesn’t get any value from it.
Your goal is to help them, to improve their quality of life, and establish yourself as a thought leader — someone they can trust to guide them through the challenges they’re facing as it relates to your area of expertise.
Content marketing is one the best ways to do that.
Why invest in content marketing?
When done well, content creates brand equity, meaning: your brand becomes more and more valuable over time as you continue to create valuable content. And the more you help your audience, the more your brand will gain a reputation as a leader in your field.
This creates a flywheel effect where you start to generate more and more momentum until suddenly you’re dominating your field.
The core way content provides value to you as a business is through organic traffic. This is where people discover you on some kind of search platform, like Google, YouTube, or a podcast directory, and go visit your content.
It’s fundamentally different from other kinds of traffic for one critical reason — these people are looking for you. They are actively searching for information related to your business — that’s how they discovered you in the first place.
On every other platform, you’re interrupting whatever they’re doing. They’re passive observers instead of active searchers. It’s typically much harder and much more expensive to do that kind of marketing (think Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and basically every other kind of advertising).
Here’s the difference in a nutshell:
On those platforms, you have to go to your audience. But with organic traffic, your audience comes to you.
This should excite you for a few reasons:
- These folks have a problem.
- They’re aware of the problem.
- They want to solve the problem.
All three of those are critical ingredients for online sales, making content marketing uniquely suited to growing your business.
Creating a content strategy
Now that you’re convinced content marketing is a good idea, you need to create a strategy.
A content marketing strategy is a plan for building an audience by publishing, maintaining, and spreading frequent and consistent content that educates, entertains, or inspires to turn strangers into fans and fans into customers.
In other words, you’re building relationships and solving problems.
If you create value and equip your readers with the information they need to solve whatever problem they’re facing, your content will succeed. If you don’t, all the fancy writing and headlines and strategies won’t do a thing.
Better still, if you can be the one to both make your audience aware they have a problem they didn’t know they had, and provide them with a perfect solution, you’ll create customers for life.
Even if there are other, better solutions out there, they won’t care — you’ll forever be the authority in their minds because you helped them first.
But before you start pumping out content like a machine, you need to do three things:
1. Determine who your customer is
It all begins with who your customer is.
What do they want? What are they struggling with? What do they look like?
You need to thoroughly understand how your customer thinks before you can begin. You need to speak their language.
Your first step is to do the research to create an imaginary version of your ideal customer.
This character, or avatar, should generally represent who you’re trying to reach with your content. You should be making proactive content decisions based on the model you come up with here.
2. Figure out what information they need
Now you need to step into their shoes and walk through their customer journey.
What steps do they need to take to do business with you? What do they need to know before buying from you, and in what order?
This is your content roadmap — your first pieces of content. Create content that addresses each step of the customer journey.
3. Choose how to say it
This is where you get a bit artistic.
You need to determine how you’re going to communicate this information to them.
What format will you use? Video? Or the written word?
What stories should you tell? What kind of tone and voice will resonate the most?
The better you know your audience, the easier this will be to determine.
Ultimately, you’ll need to run with your intuition, and then mercilessly experiment and adjust.
Over time, you’ll hone in on the perfect messaging and find success with your content marketing.
Building an audience
The key to building an audience is to write useful, relevant content about a specific topic. To build relationships through your writing and content. To unashamedly add your unique voice to the world.
That’s exactly what Brian Clark did in the early days to build Copyblogger.
He shared his knowledge, his ideas, his journey as it related to one specific niche: online marketing and copywriting.
His work drew readers interested in that topic, and because the content was good, they stayed.
They subscribed, shared, and created a community of people with shared interests.
While the number of blogs in existence has dramatically increased, and the online world looks different than it did back in 2006, the basics are still the same.
This leads me to a critical point about your content.
In order to build an audience, you need to earn it.
Your content needs to be good enough to warrant the most important resources anyone has — their time and attention.
If you put out average content, your readers will smell it from a mile away and lose interest quickly.
You may have heard that people today have lower than average attention spans, but I agreed with Copyblogger’s Editor-in-Chief, Stefanie Flaxman, when she said:
“I don’t think we have limited attention spans; I think our tolerance for average is limited.”
This hits the nail on the head. Our audiences don’t have time for below-average or even just-average content anymore.
So, the first step is to create high-quality content that is worthy of attention. But simply creating it and posting it isn’t enough.
This isn’t Field of Dreams, where all you need to do is build it and the proverbial “they” will come flocking.
You need to drive traffic, and in today’s content marketing landscape, you don’t have time to wait around to be discovered. You need to give your content a push.
To do that, look at where your audience spends their time online and start posting your content there. (Remember all that research you did about your ideal customer?)
Another option is to run paid advertising. The benefit here is that you can put your content directly in front of a highly targeted audience.
But the downside is that it costs money (obviously) and it still isn’t guaranteed to build your audience.
Putting your content in front of someone doesn’t mean that they’ll like it or want to read it in the first place.
The last way to get traffic is to borrow someone else’s audience, and by that I mean to ask people who already have an audience to share your content with them.
Maybe you publish a guest blog post on their site, or maybe they share something on social media about your article.
Either way, using your network is a fantastic (and usually free) way to get major distribution for your content. For some people, it’s all they need to do.
Just remember: Their audience needs to look like your ideal customer. You don’t want just anybody.
You want your people.
Now that we’ve talked through the benefits of content marketing, how to create a strategy, and the ways to build an audience online, let’s go over the different forms of content marketing.
Written word
The written word is the most widespread and popular form of content marketing.
The amount of written content in the world is practically immeasurable, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore it for other, more modern, fancy forms of content.
Writing is more relevant today than ever before, so let’s go over how it works as content marketing.
Blogging
The tried and true way of using writing as a content marketing platform is through blogging.
In a nutshell, blogging is where you, as a thought leader or topic-matter expert, write about relevant topics to your audience on a regular basis. Blogs can take all kinds of shapes and forms, and no two are exactly the same. Anyone can have one.
When you say the word “blogging,” most people think of a misunderstood hipster sharing their thoughts and feelings with the world from their bedroom. Those definitely exist, but that isn’t what we’re focusing on here.
We’re focused on using a blog to earn an audience, build relationships, and market and grow your content.
A blog should live on your website, usually as a subdomain or as another section of your website. From a technical standpoint, creating a blog is incredibly easy. Most website platforms have a built-in blog feature that you can simply enable.
A typical blog has three components:
- Posts
- Tags
- Categories
The post is your actual written text. Think of it as a single episode or unit of content. There’s usually one topic that gets explored throughout the length of the post.
A hot topic here is length. How long should your post be? The longer the better, right?
Not necessarily. It all depends on the goal of the post and what you’re trying to accomplish.
A typical blog post is 500–1000 words. That’s what you’ll find on your average, run-of-the mill blog. With that being said, there are some expectations.
For example, Seth Godin posts very short, 200–300 word posts. Many posts on the content platform Medium are long-form, meaning they’re much longer than your typical blog post, many times upwards of 2,000 words.
It truly does depend on your writing, which is where your topic and understanding your audience comes in to play.
Our general rule of thumb for content is:
Create what you would want to consume.
If you hate super long blog posts, don’t write them! If you don’t like writing at all, you should probably just skip this section and move on to what you do enjoy.
Your content should be an extension of you, so start paying attention to the content you like and try to figure out what you like about it. Reverse-engineer it.
That will ensure you draw like-minded people to your content so you build the right kind of audience for you.
And speaking of building an audience, let’s talk about one of the main ways you’ll get traffic to your blog: search engine optimization (SEO).
SEO
Search engine optimization is the process of tweaking your content so it gets ranked higher in search engine results.
I’m not talking about tricking the system here. That used to work back in the day, but as search engines have improved, those kinds of “black hat” techniques have all but disappeared.
Now, it works much better to work with the search engine, and in order to do that, you need to first understand how search engines work and what their motives are.
The goal of a search engine is to provide you with the most relevant information possible to whatever sentence, question, or query you type in.
The more they successfully do this, the more you’re likely to use their platform, which means they get to serve more ads to you. That’s how they make their money (this is how basically every free platform on the internet works, by the way).
So, how do they know what’s relevant or not?
By cataloging every web page in existence (also known as indexing).
Every so often, a search engine robot will “crawl” your website, going through every page, every image, every word, and link, to figure out where you belong in the online world. By analyzing the content on your website, search engines categorize you and save your information for later.
That’s why you often see millions of results when you search on Google. They’re literally showing you every webpage in existence that mentions the thing you typed in.
Obviously, nobody looks through all of them. Most people don’t even make it past the first page, which begs the question, “How do you get on the first page?”
By making sure Google knows exactly what your blog is about. There are a few ways you can do this.
First, make sure your blog is focused on one central topic. The more focused your content is, the more likely it is for a search engine to display your page.
Next, try to think about what someone who needs the information you’re sharing might type into a search engine.
For example, if you’re writing an article on retirement tips for people in their 30s, someone might search “how to save for retirement in my 30s,” or even just “retirement advice.”
Once you’ve brainstormed a few phrases, pick the one you want to focus on.
You want to use that exact phrase in your article.
I’m not talking about mentioning it in every paragraph, but it should be a top contender for your title and as part of your opening paragraph.
Ultimately, your goal is to be as useful and relevant as possible to one specific topic.
As people find and engage with your article, you’ll gain a reputation with the search engines for being relevant, and you’ll be rewarded with a higher ranking, which results in more traffic, which results in a better reputation, which results in a higher ranking, and so on.
It’s a flywheel effect that can drive hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site and effectively build your business completely on its own.
Now let’s talk about the art of engaging your readers with the written word. I’m talking about copywriting.
Copywriting
Have you ever read one of those long ads on Facebook all the way through? Or watched a hilarious commercial, like the one for the Squatty Potty or Dollar Shave Club?
In both cases, those advertisements used copywriting to capture your attention and hold it for the entire length of the ad.
Copywriting is the art of using the written word to engage, compel, and persuade. Whenever you come across the written word in any form of advertising, you’re engaging with copywriting.
But what does that have to do with you and your content marketing?
After all, you’re just writing a blog. You don’t need to know anything about writing good copy do you?
Wrong.
Becoming a skilled copywriter is one of the fastest and most effective ways to improve the results of your content marketing. It’s the difference between a reader getting bored or frantically sharing your content with everyone they know.
There’s no way I’ll be able to cover everything you need to know about copywriting in this blog post. It’s simply too broad and deep of a topic.
However, I can share some of the essential elements of good copy that you can use to start improving your content right away.
Obsess over your headlines
Good copywriters know that headlines are important.
Great writers obsess over their headlines.
It’s the one thing that determines whether or not your content gets read. You could have the most incredible content in the world, but if your headline is boring or weak, it won’t matter.
A good headline is clear, specific, and intriguing. It should both tell the reader what to expect while also teasing them about what’s inside.
Your headline should also qualify your reader, meaning that it should attract your target audience. If it’s too vague, a reader will start reading — thinking that the article applies to them — only to discover it has nothing to do with them. They’ll feel tricked.
This is critical. You aren’t just trying to get anyone and everyone to click to read your article. That becomes meaningless. You want the right person reading your article, someone who you know will get value from it.
So spend the extra minutes, hours, even days getting your headline right.
Write to someone specific
Copywriting is all about understanding the emotional and psychological state of the reader. You have to be able to get inside their heads and join the conversation.
One way to do this is to write to someone very specific. This could be an avatar of your ideal customer that you’ve created, or it could be a real person who fits the bill of your target audience.
Either way, picture this person as you write. What do they struggle with? What are there experiences? How would you talk to them if you were sitting on the couch at a coffee shop together?
Once you’re clear on that, write to them. Ignore all of your professionalism and grammar rules. Just write like you’re there at the coffee shop with them, or like you’re writing an email to them.
Without fail, your writing will become more personal and you’ll form stronger connections with your readers. They will feel like you’re talking right to them because you are, to some extent. That’s the kind of writing your audience will read, share, and buy from.
Keep it simple
One of the cardinal sins of copywriting is too much complexity that makes your message confusing.
Good copy is all about breaking things down so that your reader can easily and quickly understand what you’re talking about. This means not using complicated words, insider speak, technical jargon, and long, perfectly structured sentences.
That’s like a death warrant for your copy.
Instead, break up your sentences. State your point simply. Find the easiest, simplest way to say what you’re trying to say. Otherwise, your reader will have to work hard to sift through what you’re writing and get confused.
As a result, they don’t do anything. They don’t read, they don’t share, they don’t buy, nothing.
That’s not what you want. So keep your writing simple and to-the-point.