What is Content Marketing?
CMI defines content marketing as “… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” In layman’s terms, this translates to anything you create and publish for public consumption with the aim of adding value to your customers, clients or patients.
Why Do I Need To Do Content Marketing?
Naturally, people do not care how much you know, rather they want to know how much you care. Customer is the king. The more customers are satisfied with your products and services the more the customers will keep patronizing you. Businesses without customer repeat patronage cannot stand the test of time.
In order words, if you want to remain in business, you will need to have plans and strategies on how to keep adding value to you customers. Part of the plans could be providing the customers with information that will educate them on how to get the best out of a particular product or service. For instance, if you have diabetic patients. You might be providing them with more information on diets suitable for their condition. This will make them feel loved and cared for beyond their medication and routine medical check ups, which they have to pay for.
This is where content marketing becomes handy. Now how do I go about it? Engage a Dietician specialist on that particular medical condition to keep supplying you with variety of menu plan for diabetic patients. This information is what you now send to your patients on weekly or monthly basis via email. Or you can create a blog in your website to publish it and share it from your website to the social media.
Why does content marketing work?
Content marketing works because it gives the recipient something of value, such as information or entertainment, all while elevating your business’ visibility and credibility as the provider of the value. It allows you to reach as broad or narrow a range of targets as you desire. It creates associations between businesses and consumers and creates a positive and enriching connection.
Forms of Content Marketing:
These are different ways you can present the content.
- Blog post
- Video
- Audio
- Whitepaper
- Infographic
- Presentation
Means of Distribution
These are various medium you can use to send your content to the target audience:
- Newsletter
- RSS subscribers
- Social networks
- Email campaigns
- Community groups
- Forums
- Podcasts
- Workshops
Conclusion: Content marketing is only one path way, email marketing and social marketing are other powerful tools for communicating with your customers and building your business. However, doing only one or two of these tactics isn’t going to get the job done. You need to do each well and ensure you’re using them in concert with each other.
This is just the outcome of my research so far. There are many more to create and explore. Let us know what works for you!
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/small-business/making-content-marketing-email-and-social-media-work-in-harmony-for-your-small-business-01381847#OAeVdlvBUOAlqcOs.99