Content Marketing meaning
Doing content marketing means producing quality content, published on the Web, which has as its first objective the building of a strong link with its potential audience.
This results in an increase in Brand visibility and related business.
What is content?
It is a content creation, publishing and sharing strategy (content strategy), which involves:
- The greatest number of communication channels available: website, blogs, portals etc.
- a diverse type of content: articles, photos, images, infographics, videos, posts, tutorials etc.
This digital marketing activity is carried out on the basis of 6 basic factors:
- Budget available
- Marketing, Communication and Commercial Objectives
- Target Audience: Buyer Personas
- Target Market: Local, Regional, National, International
- Products or Services to be communicated
- Recognizability and positioning of the Company in the Market.
It is critical that each piece of content is chosen based on the content marketing campaign and created specifically for its target audience.
Content marketing can help you boost your Brand’s online positioning, acquire new customers and increase your eCommerce sales.
Content marketing and Buyer Personas
To carry out effective content writing, it is essential, first of all, to define your Buyer Persona.
The Buyer Persona is, in essence, your ideal customer.
Who do you want to buy your products and services, to come into your store or restaurant, to rely on your firm for advice.
Advertising excites, falls in love, seduces. It stirs emotions. A kilo of advertising may contain 999 grams of rationality, but it will shine and stand out for its gram of madness.
Luis Bassat Coen
Every person searching online wants to find an answer to a question, or a need.
By defining your Buyer Persona, studying their habits, what content they read, what searches they do online, we can create the right content to meet their needs.
Buyer Personas and Content Marketing enable us to attract new users and turn them into happy customers.
Content marketing and customer experience
The content speaks to the user, the user interacts with the content, based on their experience. The consumer’s experience becomes an integral part of the content itself.
This is why it is called conversational marketing. In this never-ending cycle, the customer experience, or customer experience, becomes a key element of the process itself.
If the user has had a positive experience with the product and brand, they will be happy to share it. Integrating and expanding the value of the content that the brand itself has published.
The conditio sine qua non is to craft your content strategy in a way that excites your users, engages them, and makes them part of your product.
Everything becomes experiential. And positive for Brand Awareness.
“Marketing used to be about creating myths and telling them. Now, it’s about telling a truth and sharing it.”
Marc Mathieu, Global SVP Marketing in Unilever.
Content Marketing: indexing technicalities
Placement depends on many factors:
- How many years has the domain been registered and the site published
- Domain Authority. We can define it as the reputation in terms of the value of our domain/web site on the web
- Structure and complexity of the site
- CMS used: Content Management System. The program used to make the site. Our agency uses WordPress.
- SEO Optimization
- Topics covered and how many updates are made
- How many competitors do we have? It is certainly easier to place a dental practice based in a town of 20,000 people where there are only 2 other practices on the first page than the same practice in Milan where there are thousands of competitors.
- How many Links point to our site and their importance, this extremely important activity is called Link Building
- Social Activities
- Publication of articles, comments, interactions etc.
- Use of content such as videos, photo galleries etc.
- Continuous management and optimization
As you can see from the list of activities given, to make a site visible it is not enough to publish it. It needs continuous and constant editing and optimization work.
To pursue and/or maintain this coveted outcome, it is essential to Design, Plan, and Implement careful and periodic new content writing.
The more frequently we update our website, the more frequently the spiders will return.
Basically, our site will be more analyzed by search engines, improving the indexing and visibility of our Company on the Web.
Why is a content marketing campaign so effective?
Flowchart and bi-directionality of social channels
News once posted on the site is “bounced” on social media.
This determines:
- The news will be visible to all Fans/Contacts on Company Pages, generating possible requests for contact, products and/or services;
- The news integrates a link to the site that can generate traffic and requests from the site. By increasing link building, that is, links leading directly to the site, we increase visits;
- Publishing interesting content on Social can generate high interest. Consequently, increase the interactions of our potential audience with additional shares, comments and expansion of the contact base that follows our pages.
This bi-directionality allows us to generate an information loop that is effective for both SEO and visibility purposes for our Company.
Lead Generation
The greater the visibility of the site, the greater the opportunities to obtain useful results for our Company:
- users interested in our Products and/or Services who fill out information request forms
- people who decide to buy products on our eCommerce.
Traceability and ROI
We believe that every communication activity should be measurable so that its effectiveness can be verified both in terms of communication returns and in economic terms.
Every euro invested must produce revenue for the company both in terms of turnover and in terms of visibility, Brand Awareness and Engagement.
For this reason we use applications such as:
- Google Analytics, a free service from Google, to analyze what is happening on the site, check where contacts are coming from, which pages are of most interest
- Google Search Console, Google’s free service, to analyze the Keywords (keywords) that generate the most site traffic, place TAGs on pages, and check how Google “sees” and interprets the content produced
- Semrush, a professional platform that allows you to do the Site Audit, adds to the info collected by Search Consolle valuable suggestions for improving the ranking of each individual page and the site as a whole
- HubSpot, the platform CRM (Customer Relationship Management) most widely used worldwide for the implementation of Inbound Marketing and Marketing Automation
Now we come to the most important chapter of this article.
Content Marketing: content must be of Value
How come the most important chapter at the end of this article ?
Producing valuable content takes a lot of time, dedication, research and work.
It requires, for example, building an editorial plan(content strategy) to plan the publication of all kinds of content on the website and social channels (social media marketing).
We felt it was important first to explain what benefits, for our companies, come from good content marketing.
Now that we have seen that, thanks to content marketing, we can win in the market, let’s analyze the last aspect.
Content and Inbound
When we decided to use HubSpot, not only as a CRM, but more importantly as a platform to create the Marketing Automation strategies our decision was enough, just on the philosophy that HubSpot brings to the world.
This philosophy is called Inbound Marketing and is based on the fundamental concept of respecting our customer and potential customer.
In recent years there has been a widespread belief that to do business well, to do business, we must be ruthless.
Basically, we can grow, even at the expense of our customers.
Basically, those who embrace this philosophy see their customer solely as an opportunity to grow their business, even at the expense of the customer.
This attitude leads these entrepreneurs to make short-term decisions that sacrifice long-term relationships.
“In the meantime I’ll eat today, tomorrow I’ll think about it.”
Regardless of the ethical aspect, which is not for us to evaluate, if until a few years ago this attitude might have been a viable solution, today it is no longer.
Buyers today have total power.
Thanks to the web, they can consult websites and social channels.
Read reviews, compare products, analyze technical information.
Basically, the customer no longer decides to buy a product in the store, or because he or she has seen the advertisement on television.
He decides this from the comfort of his own couch at home after he has informed himself.
For this reason, it is essential to build strong and long-lasting relationships with our target audience (audience).
This Web Marketing activity is called Inbound Marketing and is based on 3 fundamental concepts:
- Build your Buyer’s Personas.
- Analyze the Buyer’s Journey
- Quality content creation
1) Build your Buyer’s Personas.
We can define the Buyer Persona as our ideal customer.
Basically the one we would like to meet every day. Who makes us feel good, who doesn’t complain, who pays his bills on time.
If you’re thinking, “Cremonesi but what the heck are you saying, it’s no longer time, today we have to make any kind of customer fit…”
I can answer you, with absolute frankness, that that is the way to lose market share.
We cannot sell our products or services to every person we meet.
Each of us has our own needs, preferences, tastes, affordability.
If we try to sell to everyone, we basically dissipate our energy.
It is definitely more profitable, selecting the right potential customers for our products and services and then creating valuable relationships.
If you would like to explore this topic further, please read “Why build our Buyer’s Personas“
2) Analyze the Buyer’s Journey.
We can define the buyer’s journey as the different “contact stages” that occur between the company and the potential customer.
Let’s try and think about the different stages that led us to fall in love with a person.
We meet it, get to know it, evaluate it. Initially we are attracted to some details and do not want to see the “flaws.” Then, with time, we evaluate it in all its nuances.
How she dresses, behaves, talks, eats. How he makes love and how he gets angry.
Here the buyer’s journey defines and analyzes the relationships between people and companies.
When we decide to buy a product we inform ourselves. We read the technical specifications.
If possible, we ask for a demonstration. We go to the web and check reviews on sites and social media.
Not least we check how much it costs and whether there is an alternative solution at a lower price.
This is the buyer’s journey what marketeers refer to as the “buyer’s journey.”
If you would like to learn more about this topic, please read “Why analyze the Buyer’s Journey“
3) Produce only quality content
Writing quality content allows us to create the right consumer perception, credibility and trust in our company.
Needless to say, the key element is determined by the quality of our products and services.
Otherwise, there is no business to be had. We acquire some potential customers while losing existing customers.
Doing content marketing means creating quality content. that can be read by users who search the web.
Basically, doing content marketing means giving clear, relevant and useful answers to the many questions users ask on the Web.
Because in fact a web search is equivalent to a question, that is, the expression of a need.
Therefore, before focusing on content distribution, it is essential to study:
- our ideal customer (buyer’s personas)
- the contact points he has with our company (buyer’s journey)
In this way we will be clear what his needs are at each stage when:
- Comes to our website or social channels: has a need, a want and is inquiring
- Contact our sales department for more information: check
- He reads articles and data sheets on our website to see if our products and services really meet his needs: analyze
- Compare our products and services with those of competitors: decide
- Please contact us after you purchase the product for more information or if you have a problem.
This last stage is the most important.
Content marketing promote seduce and sell with content
With the sale we made a promise to our new customer:
- Thanks to our cream, you will no longer have stretch marks
- Our grass cutter never stops
- With our car you get 1,000 km on a full tank of gas
The last stage is the most important one because it shows whether the company has really built a process that always protects the customer or, if once they become customers, they forget about them.
Writing useful content means creating a bond of trust with our customer, even and especially in the post-sale phase.
How. By sending:
- useful information on how to use our product
- the recipe of the week even though we are restaurateurs
- a video for improving one’s workout from home when he cannot come to the gym.
There are so many activities we can carry out to make our client feel like a king.
If you’re thinking, But so he won’t come to the gym anymore, he won’t come to my restaurant anymore, why does he still have to come to my agency if I’m explaining how to make valuable content?
Don’t worry. By providing valuable content, he considers you a professional and trusts you.
He will talk well about your products and services with his friends, and this will get your business off the ground.
Content Marketing examples
De Lalla Law Firm’s website is an excellent example of content marketing
A few years the agency created the new De Lalla Law Firm website.
Attorney Giuseppe De Lalla is a great Professional and a great person from the human point of view.
A person I deeply respect and with whom there is a great relationship.
Working with and for him is always a great satisfaction.
I still remember our first meeting, during which I explained to Attorney De Lalla the value of having a site.
The basic concepts of search engine indexing, the strategic importance of continuous updating, what we call content marketing in the jargon.
This article is an open and sincere applause for the content marketing work accomplished by the entire Law Firm Staff. Not only in the Legal field, but totally across the board, what the Law Firm has accomplished has been truly extraordinary.
Now you only need to do an online search to see how, www.studiolegaledelalla.it, is highly indexed. To date there are 1,440 contents. Truly extraordinary.
Find out what Attorney Giuseppe De Lalla had to say about the work done by Factory Communication.
Read the full review at the following link: Find out what Attorney De Lalla of Factory Communication had to say.
The important thing that emerges from this article is that the Internet, and more specifically the website, are a real driver, a great Business opportunity for Companies and Professional Studies.
Probably only 5 percent of activities or businesses cannot benefit from the Web. Of the remaining 95%, the Web is strategically critical.
Of course it takes time. “Cremonesi doesn’t want us to be writing articles every week, does he?”
If you don’t believe in the web and your website, why should search engines?
If you don’t invest time in content marketing (continuous updating of the site) why would a user, a potential Customer, choose to come to your site rather than to another one that is up-to-date, useful, where he can find many answers to his problems?
This is the key to success.
The site should be a container of suggestions, ideas, strategies, solutions to problems.
It cannot be just a commercial showcase.
The user needs to understand the real value of your product and service. There is no point in hiding. Be frank, direct and concrete.
Say what goes but, more importantly, what doesn’t go.
The user will love you for this.
Want to learn more about the issues involved in your content marketing plan?
Read these articles
- Inbound Marketing that respects the Customer
- Measure your enterprise content marketing activity with these KPIs
- Artificial intelligence for copywriting in content marketing: yes or no?
- Do you want to do content mkt for Gen Z? Get to know Gen Z
- B2B video marketing: 4 ideas for your strategy!
- Description of menu dishes: you have to give value to your Product
- 4 ways to use AI in your marketing strategy
