What is content marketing?

Traditional marketing is based on the concept that you carefully design powerful ads, then pay for the pleasure of showing them to people, usually by interrupting their lives. You interrupt their attention with a billboard, their TV show or radio with a commercial break, the flow of their magazine with a page-long banner, etc. It’s essentially the whole concept of advertising in the last century, and it’s a model built upon paying for impressions.

Content marketing flips that model on its head and instead says, what if we created content so valuable, so interesting to our target audience that we didn’t have to pay for them to see it - they just wanted to see it, and they actively went out of their way to see it. That’s the idea of content marketing, it’s all about ‘inbound marketing’ where your audience comes to you and willingly engages with your content, as opposed to ‘outbound marketing’ where you use paid advertising to interrupt your users.

Content marketing can be really powerful because consumers have become increasingly skeptical of the claims made by marketers and often find content marketing to be more authentic, engaging, and high-value. On the other hand, you aren’t paying a dime to generate impressions. Once you’ve created high-quality content and built a strategy for sharing it with your target audience, then it becomes a bit of a marketing machine for you.

Take us, Institute of Code, for example. Our free 7 day challenges were a form of content marketing and one that many students completed before deciding to enroll in our Bootcamp. We could have just created ads that told you how great we were, but it’s always more powerful to show it than to tell it. By giving away free and valuable information while establishing the right brand associations (our teaching skills, quality of content, etc.), we had people coming to us wanting to learn about what else we offered. And it’s much more convincing than spamming people with ads hoping they would pay attention.

Content marketing can include social media content, blog posts, infographics or downloadable e-books, cheat sheets or guides, podcasts, video content (on youtube, IGTV, your own website, etc.)

I wouldn’t say that anything published on social media or a blog is automatically content marketing, it depends on whether it’s giving value or just a blatant promotion. So let’s say you’re a yogurt company. A post saying ‘look how great our yogurt is’ isn’t really content marketing. But a post about smoothie bowl recipes (that just might so happen to include your product) is a great example - you’re giving so much value that they actually want to follow you and see your content.

Generally speaking, content marketing is anything interesting and valuable to your audience that they willingly choose to read, watch or engage with.

How to get started with content marketing

A good content marketing strategy has 3 parts:

  1. You create content that is valuable and interesting to your audience.
  2. You figure out how you’re going to get that content in front of your audience.
  3. You have some plan for what happens after they view your content, what action you are driving them towards.

Let’s go over each one quickly. To create valuable content, you need to look for the intersection between what your audience cares about and what your area of expertise is. In other words, what content you can authentically talk about while still staying on your brand. You want to make sure it’s relevant, interesting, and engaging for them - will they save it to come back to it or share it with their friends? Would they click on it if they saw it amongst dozens of other posts on Pinterest? It can be educational content that teaches them something, or helpful resources like templates and downloadable digital assets, or even just entertaining content that makes them smile.

If you’re trying to approach this section before you’ve figured out who your audience is and what they care about, you’re almost guaranteed to struggle. Make sure you’ve done the work understanding your target audience before you start to develop a content strategy.

Then you have to figure out how to get that content in front of your target audience - how you’re going to leverage social media growth tactics like hashtags and location tags, optimize your web content for SEO, share it on Pinterest, etc.

Then you need to think about what happens next. How are you going to use that content to get results for your business? What’s the goal of it? Are you trying to drive traffic to your blog, where the goal is just increasing your traffic overall? Are you trying to drive sales of your online store or generate leads for new potential clients?

I see this all the time where someone makes an e-book because everyone else is doing it, but then when someone reads the e-book, there is no call-to-action or business value created from it. So you need to think about how the content you’re creating will help build your brand or help people better understand the value of your products or services, and ideally, how it will help you get closer to your goals.

Figuring out your content pillars

Content pillars are 3 to 5 topics your brand will consistently discuss, amplify, and create content for on social media. It comes back to being focused on your niche, and you’ll find that being an expert in one area or a few specific things will help your audience grow faster. You can think of this kind of like a pyramid. The more focused you are on your particular niche in the beginning, the quicker you will grow. And then, once you’ve built an audience that knows, likes, and trusts you, you can expand to more topics.

A few ideas to brainstorm:

An example I love is a shoe company in the UK, they discovered that their international customers were confused about shoe size conversions and were always asking for help. So they created a UK to US shoe size converter on their website, and a few weeks later, they discovered their traffic had spiked because at the time, nobody else had done a good shoe size conversion chart, so they ranked high in Google searches and got a ton of new traffic.

Now, this is valuable not just because it got them lots of traffic, but because it got them lots of targeted traffic. Who looks for a shoe conversion site? Someone who is looking to buy new shoes. So they added a second below the shoe size conversion chart that showed off their range, and this one page became one of their highest drivers of traffic.

Examples - Specialty crayons for special needs, supermarket & skincare brand

I had a client once who had a very niche product, which was a set of easy-to-draw crayons for special needs kids. She struggled to figure out how to reach her audience because nobody was searching for what she had to offer since people didn’t even know the product existed. Since nobody was searching for ‘special needs crayons’, we had to think broader in her content pillars and came up with 3 main pillars:

The first is the most directly related to her product and the pain points of her customers - they are trying to teach their child to draw, and they are struggling with it. The second is the broader, higher-level goal of her customers - they want to help their children with their motor skills. And the third is just expanding the focus a little to show their expertise and really resonate with their target audience, showing them that they care and build a relationship with them.

So some of the pieces of content we came up with were things like:

By expanding the focus from just the product, you’re actually increasing the likelihood that people will buy your product because you’re building trust with them. They are getting repeated exposure to the brand as they keep coming back to you for more content, and you establish yourself as somewhat of a thought-leader in your space.

Let’s look at two more examples. The first is a gourmet supermarket chain we worked with in Bali. Our content pillars were:

The second is the Australian skincare brand frank body, you can see their content pillars spread across all their social media platforms, but it’s most evident on their blog where they break it down into:

That sounds pretty broad, and honestly, it is because they have grown big enough and built enough of a rapport with their audience that they can get away with it. But even across the other ‘topics’, 80% of their content still involves skin in some way - the first topic in life is ‘why oil cleansing can clear your skin’ and in health is ‘how I learned to love my stretch marks’.

For a brand posting so much content every day, that could start to feel a little one-dimensional, and as you grow, you can expand your content focus, so then they add things like ‘self-care tips you didn’t realize were self-care’ and ‘5 booty moves to do in under 5 minutes’. Even though this is broader, it’s still very relevant - their product is all about taking care of yourself and toning and tightening your skin, so there is still a strong focus across all their content. Definitely have a scroll through.

Applying the process for yourself

So to do this, I like just to grab a piece of paper and try to brainstorm and come up with maybe 5-10 content pillars that I think are relevant to my business and my audience. Then, I just try to brainstorm as many individual topics or content ideas as I can for each one. Feel free to look for inspiration online by searching in Google, Pinterest or Youtube for your content pillars or topic ideas and see what other related content comes up.

Just like when you’re figuring out your niche, the more focused you go, the better when you’re first starting out. Travel or Wellness are VERY broad topics and you’re likely going to need to further focus that down to specific segments or subjects.

This helps me figure out how much I actually have to say on one topic because it’s generally easier to focus on 1-3 content pillars first and then expand as you feel like you’ve thoroughly covered those topics. You might find that some content pillars come naturally to you, and then there are others that you struggle to come up with ideas.

Then, look at which of the content pillars you think your audience will be MOST interested in and which one can easily build the right brand associations and make people excited to become your customer.

And just like that, in only an hour or two, you can brainstorm dozens of content ideas that you can turn into blog posts, social media content, videos etc.

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