The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Beginners

Just like a rainbow, marketing has different colours. Unlike a rainbow, marketing evolves every few years to pave the way for new marketing strategies. Some techniques that gained much ground in the last decade include affiliate marketing, content marketing, influencer marketing & guerrilla marketing. But today, we are going to talk about content marketing. The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Beginners. We will answer the three big questions – what, why, & how? So, let’s begin.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy to get people hooked on the content that brands provide without actively going out and promoting their products. The basic understanding includes brands creating engaging and informative content & hoping that it pays off when businesses ultimately promote their product on any online platform. Companies hope customers will repay them through brand loyalty and increased sales for providing useful information.

Let’s take a small case study to help you understand content marketing. We’ll consider the Instagram page called Finshots. With over 500k followers, the Instagram page provides financial information through catchy infographics and useful written articles. They even have an email newsletter for anyone who subscribes to it. Instagram and Email cover the content part. Let’s talk about the business part now. Finshots is owned by a company called Ditto Insurance. Often, Finshots adds a promotional post for its insurance business and hopes its readers will value the information it provides. They subconsciously trust Ditto Insurance as a good service provider to buy a policy for themselves. That’s exactly what Content Marketing is.

Why should you consider Content Marketing?

1. Future of Marketing:

   There is no hiding that traditional marketing channels are becoming obsolete by the day. They still might have a good market share, but not for too long. Content is the future. Every established brand and every start-up is betting on its web presence to bring in higher leads, sales and revenue.

2. Affordable:

   Traditional marketing tactics like billboards, TV ads, online advertisements etc., burn a lot of any company’s budget. Content Marketing provides better results with lesser investment. The major expenses in Content marketing include hiring graphic designers, video editors or writers, depending on what type of content you are hoping to put out.

3. Umbrella Term:

   Content marketing comes under the umbrella of Digital Marketing. It is just one aspect of it. But everything related to online marketing comes under content. You could be active on YouTube, Instagram, Google, Tiktok, Twitter or any other platform. Eventually, every company hopes to turn their follower count into active purchase-making customers.

4. Grow your Affiliate Business:

   Content plays a very important role in becoming a successful affiliate marketer. If you are a content marketer, you are already on your way to earn with affiliate marketing. You can have a great audience, loyal customers, and good reach to attract new viewers, all through online content. All of this can be used to promote someone else’s products and earn some cash on the side. This can be subtly put in front of the audience in the form of strategic partnerships and collaborations.

How to do Content Marketing?

There are some basic dos and don’ts in content marketing. Let us walk you through some of the dos first.

1. Figure your Goals: Garbage content is available everywhere on the internet. You do not want your content to sink into this huge pile of trash that is uploaded on the web every day. You need to figure out your goal in creating this content. Asking yourself questions about your followers’ projections, engagement, leads, sales, and customer feedback and figuring out a reasonable goal is the best way to start.
2. Choose Your Platform: Content Marketing only works for you if you specialize on a single platform at once. Jumping on all internet platforms will only divert focus and will not give you the full benefit of this powerful tool. You can use any platform like email, social media (Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc.), blogs, podcasts, webinars etc., depending on your reader demographic, customer spending potential, & budgetary constraints.
3. Competition Research: Business in 2022 is cutthroat. You would not want to get blindsided when you enter the content marketing industry, so it is important that you do a full background check of your rivals. It is important to understand their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and learn from all of them to follow the best practices in your business.
4. Topic Research: When you start creating content for the platform of your choice, you create a tone for your company. You want your social media goals to align with your company goals, so you must know which topics you will create content on. It could be anything ranging from infographics & case studies to memes & how-to content.
5. Strategize: Now that you have answers to some of the most basic questions about your content, it is important to strategize on your schedule, number of posts, tone of your content, budget allocation etc. Make sure to keep tracking your audience’s reaction to your posts so that you can create the best content and reel in more viewers.
6. Platform-Specific Tools: Every internet platform has some specific tool or feature that helps a content creator gain organic reach. It could be Google’s SEO, Instagram’s hashtags, YouTube’s subscriber count or anything else. Every platform has one of these. It will help if you read up on these specific tools on whichever platform you post your content on.

Now, let us discuss some of the don’ts in content marketing.

• Everything about Yourself: Content marketing is not about you. It’s about providing value to your readers. Adding to their knowledge, educating them on different topics and making them better consumers. You can occasionally include your product promotion and ask customers to take action, but it should be very subtle. Please don’t make it about yourself.
• Impatience: The Internet, especially social media, is a long-term game. Patience is the name of this game. It would be best if you always keep your eyes on the big picture of building a knowledgeable and wide reader base rather than trying to gain followers as soon as possible. Content marketing is crazy, but you need to be classy with it.
• Plagiarize: This is a no-brainer when creating content. Do not try to copy anyone else’s work. If you are quoting someone or borrowing from someone else’s content, give them credit. Always create your original content after doing your research and analysis.
• Spamming: Businesses do not need to spam their viewers’ feeds. As we said, you need to be classy with your content and posting at regular intervals is a significant part of it. However, uploading content five to seven times every day will hurt your credibility and decline your content quality.
• Not adding a CTA: A Call-to-Action or a CTA involves asking your readers to take some action on your post rather than just reading and swiping past it. It could be asking your followers to like, comment or share your post. Asking new users to follow/subscribe is also a very good idea. CTAs usually increase your reach on any platform, which helps get your profile in front of more eyeballs.

Conclusion

Content Marketing is a powerful tool. With social media and internet usage increasing daily, content can make all the difference in how your business & sales perform. If you have reached here and are still reading, we are sure that now you know what you need to do to create a viral content strategy for your business. So, don’t wait up!