According to Content Marketing Institute, “ It is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Some impressive statistics of content marketing

• Content marketing provides conversion rates about 6 times higher than other digital marketing methods. (ABG Essentials)
• Video content can help provide a great ROI and significantly increase conversions, according to 72% of businesses surveyed. (CrazyEgg)
• After reading recommendations on a blog, 61% of online consumers in the U.S. then decided to make a purchase.
• According to 74% of companies surveyed, content marketing has increased their marketing leads, both in quantity and quality. (Curata)
• Inbound marketers are able to double the average site conversion rate (from 6 to 12%), in part due to their content marketing efforts. (HubSpot)

Why do businesses choose content marketing?

It is very much important to understand why businesses exactly choose content marketing and for that, we need to go first through the marketing buying cycle to understand the main motto of content marketing:

1. Awareness: Your customer could have a need but he doesn’t know what its solution really is. So that is why awareness is important when you are a small business or launching a new product.
2. Research: Once the customer is fully aware that there is a solution, they will start researching to educate themselves.
3. Consideration: Now at this point the customer starts comparing different products from multiple sources to make sure that they’re getting a high-quality product at a reasonable price.
4. Buy: In the last step, the customer makes their final decision and moves forward and completes the transaction, and makes a purchase.

What is the difference between content and content marketing?

Content Marketing: Content Marketing is basically all about attracting a type of targeted audience to provide them an experience or a destination that you own, build, and optimize to achieve the objective of your marketing.

Content: Content is just everywhere, especially on the internet from products to advertising everything has content.

Using content marketing you are attracting a bunch of audience to a brand-owned destination versus interrupting or buying an audience on someone else’s platform.

Major Components of Content Marketing

• Blog posts
• Case studies
• Demos
• E-Books
• Workbooks and templates
• White papers and reports
• Video
• Cheat sheets
• Info-graphic
• Slide decks

What are the benefits of Content Marketing?

• Content marketing is said to be the best method of reaching your target audience by offering them relevant, engaging, personalized, and quality content.
• It helps you to improve your content and website.
• It also enables you to transmit your brand’s values.
• Content marketing is very much helpful for attracting and retaining potential clients on Social Networks.
• Creating relevant articles and content for your audience increases your chances of appearing on the first page of the Google Search Result Page (SERP).

What are the common problems that can be solved through Content Marketing?

1. No engaging content: Content marketing helps you provide valuable stuff to your audience which will ultimately let them engage and buy from you.
2. Low organic search: As we all know audience can’t buy from you if they are not able to find you.

To deal with this problem, marketing help you to build organic and reputed brand awareness because you started by delivering highly engaging and valuable content, your content will start getting ranked in top searches of Google, or it will start getting shared on social media platforms.

3. No brand preference: As your content is now engaging and valuable, it will create a strong bond and relation of you with your audience as they will start trusting you for information and education purposes and the chance of people from your business will increase automatically.

What Your Content Marketing strategy should include?

• Goals
• Success metrics
• KPIs
• Target audience
• Content strategy
• Reporting framework
• Distribution strategy
• Measurement framework

How to design Content Marketing?

1. Firstly understand your main marketing objective.
2. Try to understand your audience by taking leverage from social influencers.
3. Define your goals and metrics.
4. Put your content in front of a small audience like your team members
5. Observe how your audience interacts with your content
6. Then improve accordingly.
7. As more often you feed these observations back into your content, the more likely you will be able to meet the needs of your audience.
8. In the last Publish, as you have implemented what works. Now, execute your plan to the fullest, now keep learning, observing, and improving!A to Z Guide; How To Start A Blog In India | Pro Blogging Tips

Lenovo Content Marketing Case Studies

As we know, Lenovo is world’s one of the largest and leading computer hardware manufacturers.

Lenovo’s marketing team made an excellent content marketing strategy, in which they first started creating brand awareness at a large scale among their audience and this leads to results in building trust among the audience. (main their targeted audience was IT professionals)

The main aim of this Lenovo Marketing was to help their targeted audience be informed before taking any buying decisions and to keep Lenovo at the top-of-mind recall while making those decisions.

They started creating engaging and informative content to educate their targeted audience by distributing their valuable content across all the major social channels.

To execute this marketing strategy, Lenovo developed a digital content hub called “Tech Revolution” to deliver all the major technology news and technology information to IT decision-makers across the Asia Pacific region.

This marketing strategy leads Lenovo to engage and connect with its target audience successfully.

The marketing strategy of Lenovo was hugely successful as the digital content hub had more than 250 articles with 34 million impressions, and 308 link clicks and was visited by approximately 1,70,000 new web users.

In terms of revenue, $300 million in sales was attributable to this initiative alone.

Conclusion

We hope that this guide will help you clear all your major and minor doubts regarding the question: “what is content marketing?”

As we all know “Rome was Not Built in a Day”, similarly Content Marketing definitely takes some time to get a kick start.

But when it does, you can find that your site will start getting more traffic, leads, as well as customers, and that, is why it is a very popular marketing channel.

So start from the basics on day one and only focus on creating that piece of content that easily connect with your audience and then make sure that you remain consistent with that type of content.

You, once you master all the major fundamentals of content marketing, then start experimenting with SEO and new content formats for better and improved results.