Content marketing was invented by marketers after the content exchanges appeared. Therefore, this field of work is quite new. But the competition became more intense, and it was necessary to come up with a new movement — Inbound or “incoming” marketing. It is almost no different from content marketing, only the articles have a new name and price.
To learn more about this topic, it is necessary to define the concept first. So, content marketing is content based on a comprehensive strategy, adapted to the target audience with built-in internal search engine optimization, LSI, graphical visualization and other essential attributes.
It includes:
- Publication in social networks (posts with text and photos);
- Email marketing (short and long letters coming to the post office);
- Video marketing (due to high cost, less often used)
- Promotion in thematic platforms (regular guest articles), etc.
Content marketing is one of the strategies of information promotion, which globally consists of three stages:
The first stage of content marketing is to attract an audience. For this purpose, 6 sources are used:
- search engine optimization (SEO and LSI, semantic and thematic kernels, organic search traffic);
- social networks (organic social traffic);
- paid advertising (PPC, PPM, targeted advertising, purchased advertising in communities, opinion leaders, etc.);
- email-marketing (supports a stable inflow of audience, but with the right approach)
- thematic platforms (places of gathering of the target audience);
- search engine optimization.
The second stage is the triggers in content marketing, which is responsible for monetization.
Conditionally, there are 8 psychological triggers, which are used in content marketing:
- mutual exchange;
- goodwill;
- authority;
- mental involvement;
- social proof;
- curiosity;
- fear;
- needs on Maslow’s pyramid.
Step three is monetization, which is done in two ways:
- You sell your content to an audience. The only condition is that it must be of very high quality, otherwise triggers are not activated and the audience will not buy anything.
- You have attracted the audience, and then sell it to your advertisers. For example, launching a content project with Google AdSense contextual advertising on it.
In conclusion, we can confidently say that content marketing is a powerful lever that brings money. But only with a competent approach, spending energy and money, sometimes considerable.