Content marketing. Fancy term, eh? So what exactly is content marketing? If you ask Google, you’ll get this as your answer – “Content marketing is any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of median and publishing content in order to acquire customers.” Well, that’s a quite a mouthful isn’t it? Fret not, content marketing is not that hard to understand, provided you look at it with a simplistic eye.
Imagine that you have set up a small bakery. Now, in order to get customers you might ask your friends and family to refer your bakery to their friends and family and so on. You might also place an advertisement in the local newspaper or even pay for a cable advertisement. Is this marketing? Of course. But it’s not exactly content marketing. If you publish a few pamphlets with a small description of your bakery, pictures of the kind of goods you sell, the interior of your store and so on, THAT would be content marketing.
In the example above, you CREATED some kind of content about your establishment (the description, remember?) which you ultimately published. Hence, your bakery gains popularity. Your sales increase but you’re not really happy. You thought that the pamphlets would do the trick, but obviously that does not cover for the people who never received a pamphlet. What do you do then?
If you’re like every other member in your demographic class, you would turn to the internet for help. Probably a Facebook page first, and then a website and voila, your customer count soars.
So what exactly happened here? Obviously, the paper pamphlets were not enough as a large number of people now prefer the internet as a means of communication in their daily life. So that’s the first thing to remember about content marketing – target the media with the largest customer base.
Now that you have a steady stream of customers, you’d probably like to make more profit right? The best way to do that is to get more customers. So, now you decide on what kind of customers prefer your bakery.Since we are considering a bakery, almost all kinds of people would visit your store but for the sake of better understanding, let us assume that middle aged housewives are the most frequent visitors.
Once you’ve identified the specific customer base, it’s simply a matter of promoting your establishment in the areas which are preferred by the targets. In this case, local grocery stores,primary schools, community buildings etc. would be the perfect place to put up posters/promote your store. You might have to alter the content to suit your targeted customer base.
Since you have to put up so many posters and pamphlets, you might want to keep refreshing the content so as to avoid being boring. You might decide to choose a bold color theme for the posters in order to take care of the aesthetic requirements.
These are the basic building blocks of content marketing. Depending on the media used, there are specific techniques designed to provide maximum marketing. There is another thing yo must keep in mind – never sell your product as too shallow or too classy. Try to keep it somewhere in the middle. Try to follow the pyramid below:
Good luck! 🙂
Leave a Reply