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Let’s be real, marketing is kind of a drag — I know I personally hate being bombarded by ads I didn’t sign up to see, emails I didn’t ask for, and spammy ads in my social media feed. What I much prefer is being entertained, reassured and supported by companies that actually have my best interest at heart.

Starting out just after college, I faced finances for the first time. I literally had no idea where to start and, after a quick search for “finance basics,” I found SoFi’s article, 10 Personal Finance Basics. After reading it — and a few more of their stories — I signed up for their newsletter and, eventually, their money-management platform.

That’s content marketing.

I not only didn’t dread SoFi’s marketing — I looked forward to it. Likewise, if you create content for your audience instead of marketing to them, the sales will flow. But to be successful, you have to become a credible and authoritative resource, earn your audience’s loyalty and trust, and grow an active subscriber base before you can increase profits.

What Is Content Marketing, and How Does it Work?

Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing content created with your audience’s needs in mind, as opposed to solely focusing on the benefits for your brand or product, in order to build an engaged audience to whom you’ll easily be able to sell.

When I’m asked, “What is content marketing, anyway?” (typically around a place like the Thanksgiving dinner table), I usually respond with a question: “Have you ever signed up for a newsletter or subscribed to a YouTube channel? Why?”

They usually respond yes, and explain to me that they either read or watched something they liked, and wanted to see more.

“That’s content marketing,” you’ll hear me say from across the table. “Did you then see anything related to that company or person’s products? Did you buy?”

If the answer is yes, you’ll hear me say, “That’s good content marketing.”

It’s definitely an undertaking, but the benefits are extraordinary. If you do it right, you can build:

• A potential customer base that trusts you, and is loyal to you.
• An authoritative and credible brand that people want to hear from.
• A subscriber base that wants to hear from you, and to whom you can easily sell.
• An endless supply of upper funnel leads to fuel your sales funnel.
• A touchpoint for current and past customers, to keep them coming back again and again.

This is not a new idea by any means. An early — and now, famous — example is Poor Richard’s Almanack, an annual magazine first published in 1732 by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin didn’t create the Almanack out of the goodness of his heart — he did it to sell his printing business.

In doing so, he was one of the first to uncover the foundational truth behind content marketing: It’s not about your brand, product or service, it’s about your audience. He created something of value to them and, in return, his business flourished.

By putting your most empathetic and genuine foot forward, you prove that you truly care about your customers, and that they can trust you by giving you a slice of their precious budget.

Why Use Content Marketing?

As mentioned, content marketing can be a bit of an undertaking, so why do it? The answer is that it works. At the end of the day, you’ll see more conversions and sales because you’ve worked to educate your audience while building a lasting relationship with them. In most cases, it works a lot better than traditional marketing tactics.

Many marketers already know this, which is exemplified by the huge brands that have jumped on the content marketing bandwagon — Sephora, LEGO, Bumble, Taco Bell, Patagonia, Dell Technologies, and Marriott just to name a few.

Content Marketing Examples

Bumble

Let’s look at Bumble’s The Buzz as an example. This online magazine is a star example of content marketing, featuring stories of couples who’ve found love on the popular dating app, as well as tactical (and funny) tips and tricks for dating.

The content is relatable, inspiring, and is genuinely helpful for people looking for love online. In the midst of all of that empathetic helpfulness, there are of course several calls-to-action (CTAs), or opportunities for those engaged readers to download Bumble’s app.

LEGO

This is another powerful (if admittedly overused) example. Have you seen The LEGO® Movie? Then you just experience a one hour and 41 minute content marketing campaign, in the form of a movie. A campaign that worked so well, they spent millions more dollars to make another one, and various spin-offs.

Deloitte

In order to support their consulting business, Deloitte published Business Chemistry, an amazing piece of thought leadership that undoubtedly provides value to their audience, and proves that Deloitte is the authority when it comes to running your business smoothly.

Blinkist

Blinkist needed a platform that would allow them a little more storytelling. The combination of Blinkist Magazine and a distribution strategy that includes Taboola successfully brings them app downloads.

Western Union

This touching content marketing example from Western Union tells the story of Americans without power in Puerto Rico after one of their worst hurricanes, and touches on their financial stress, which Western Union can help with.

Synchrony

Synchrony wants to be positioned as an expert in payment innovation. To support that goal, they launched their State of Pay portal, which is packed with valuable content for business owners looking for payment solutions.

These big brands (and many more) aren’t spending money to create this content out of the goodness of their hearts — they’re doing it because it’s impacting sales in the following ways:

• It’s improving their brand awareness — or in simpler terms, increasing the amount of people who know their company exists.
• It’s building their credibility and authority in their niche, making them and their employees thought leaders.
• It’s engaging the people that are now aware of their brand by providing them valuable content, but also creating ample opportunities to engage with more content, and eventually subscribe.
• It’s helping them generate leads, or build a subscriber base, to which they’ll be able to easily sell in the future.
• It’s provided them a massive list of people to whom they can now sell to for free, increasing sales.

While there are offline types of content marketing (as I demonstrated with my LEGO example), I’m going to focus on online content marketing, and how you can build an audience with digital content marketing campaigns that will eventually drive sales.

How Does Content Marketing Drive Sales?

Content marketing drives sales by moving a relevant and engaged audience down the sales funnel, using content that’s valuable and empathetic to their needs. This content encourages that audience to subscribe to your email marketing updates, where you eventually sell to them when they’re ready.

To do this successfully, the content you create must be chosen strategically, and must be mapped to your funnel.

Your content marketing funnel should mirror your sales funnel, the only difference being that it highlights the content moving people through the buyer journey. Content marketing can move people all the way from the top of the funnel to the bottom — to demonstrate how, I’ll walk through content in four basic stages:

• Awareness: The consumer doesn’t know you exist, and might not think they need your product or service.
• Consideration: The consumer has need for your product or service, but isn’t sure you’re the right fit.
• Decision: The consumer is ready to buy, but needs to be reassured you’re the right fit and led through the sales process.
• Loyalty: The consumer has bought from you, and is in the position to do so again.

To illustrate these three stages of the funnel, meet Alex, Ana and Joseph.

Each of these personas I’ve chosen is potentially a different member of your audience. If you reach them with valuable and relevant content for their stage of the buyer journey, from a place that’s genuinely empathetic to their needs, they have a much higher chance of moving closer to a sale.

Below is an example of what that journey might look like. Although the content types here are simply suggestions — you’ll have to experiment with your audience to find the types of content that resonate with them the most — in my humble opinion, infographics, blog posts, videos, and other types of content can work at any stage of the funnel: What’s really important is the subject matter.

At the top of the funnel, you shouldn’t be hard-selling at all. This content should exist purely to add value to your audience’s lives. The further your audience gets down the funnel, the more you can talk freely about your products or services.

To illustrate this a bit further, here are some more example content funnels from the food, fitness, and home and garden industries:

These example funnels look enticingly straightforward — it’s a wonderful dream to imagine that consumers move in a linear path through the funnel from awareness all the way to becoming a loyal customer, but in reality, marketers know that’s not the case. Consumers may move backwards and forwards through this funnel, skip steps, or react in unexpected ways to the content you produce.

The only solution to this mess is easy to say, but very hard to do: Keep providing them with valuable content in the right place, at the right time.

For that, you’ll need a solid distribution strategy, and digital content campaigns that hit the mark.

Digital Content Marketing Campaigns

A content marketing campaign is the process of creating and effectively distributing a piece of content, or multiple pieces of content, for a specific key performance indicator (KPI) at a specific stage of the funnel.

Maybe, for example, you’re a technology platform looking to increase the number of consumers in the awareness stage of your funnel. To engage them, you create content that showcases data from your platform and provides those consumers valuable insights into your vertical or niche. To connect consumers with that content, you launch a social media campaign and measure the amount of new user traffic you receive on those pages, as an indication of how many new people have discovered your brand through that content.

Sticking with the technology platform example, take Hootsuite’s 2015 Game of Thrones video campaign. Hootsuite wanted to increase awareness of their brand, so they created this video that illustrates the ‘Game of Social Thrones.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zCw_-XsTPE

The end card of this video is the soft-ball version of a call to action that says “remember us” with copy that simply states, “Hootsuite: Unite Your Social Thrones.” The campaign went viral when distributed on YouTube and other channels, and blew Hootsuite’s expectations out of the water.

Digital content marketing campaigns like this one need just three things to succeed:

• Great, valuable content in a format that’s engaging for your consumer base.
• A distribution strategy that gets your content in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
• Measurement infrastructure that allows you to track your content’s return on investment (ROI), or rather, if the gains justified the means to make it in the first place.

Sounds like a piece of cake, right? Just kidding, but it’s well worth the impact that doing it right can make in support of your brand and your sales efforts.

Types of Content Marketing Distribution

Now, I’ve talked a lot about creating valuable content, but the distribution is just as important. There are two basic methods you can use to get your content in front of the right people when they want to see it: You can use organic distribution methods (those you don’t pay for) or paid distribution methods, like content advertising (those that you do pay for).

These are some of the most common content promotion tactics used by digital and content marketers alike:

Content discovery

You might immediately consider trying to reach consumers on search engines and social sites, but there’s the rest of the web to consider, too. Discovery platforms allow you to reach consumers on sites across the open web using paid advertising. (This is what we do here at Taboola.)

Organic social media

This is distributing content on your own social media channels to drive traffic to content, but also using these platforms to build relationships with consumers. This is an important part of any company’s distribution strategy, but it can take a while to build an engaged audience.

Social media advertising

To reach consumers on social media quickly, you can purchase ads on social media sites to get your content in front of them faster.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

This is the process of building content that’s likely to rank well for a search term that’s relevant to you. Traffic flows when people search for that keyword and click on your content.

Search advertising

You can also buy placements at the top of search keywords using paid advertisements, the same way you would on social sites.

Public Relations

When you have something incredibly valuable to say, you can pitch publications to increase your reach.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

This technically covers discovery, social media, and search ads as well, but you can also pay for things like display ads to attract more consumers.

Email marketing

Once consumers subscribe, you can continue to provide them with valuable content through regular email marketing campaigns.

How To Build an Effective Content Marketing Campaign

There are a lot of potential starting points to grapple with if you’re just breaking into content marketing for the first time. There’s far too much to cover in one article, but I’ll get you started with the basics and provide some resources that will allow you to take a deeper dive where you see fit.

Successful content marketing can only become possible when you’ve mapped the following:

• Key business and consumer needs, and how you can address them.
• Where in the buyer’s journey or funnel you need to focus.
• The appropriate content types used to address those needs.
• A content marketing strategy that maps the above three bullets, as well as a distribution and measurement strategy to report on your efforts.

Step 1: Define Business and Consumer Needs

Step one is the most critical, and the step that I’ve seen skipped the most by companies from all verticals. That happens mostly because it’s hard — to define key business and consumer needs, you need to have a lot of conversations. You need to talk to consumers who’ve already purchased your product, and prospective buyers if they’ll let you. Ask them questions like these to try to understand what they need from you:

• What was the ultimate deciding factor before you purchased our product? Was it price, a feature, because there was an immediate need and you needed to move fast?
• Did you do any research before making your buying decision? Where did you conduct that research?
• What problem are we solving for you in your daily life?

You might think you know the answers to these questions already, but then again, you might be surprised. Once you’re done, turn to your sales teams and ask them:

• What moves the easiest? Which products move the slowest?
• When customers decide not to make a purchase, why is that the case?
• What’s the most positive point of feedback you hear regularly from prospects? What’s the most negative?

Then, take the information from those conversations and fill in the gaps. Maybe you’re selling furniture for a home, and you’re constantly talking about pricing and discounts. In your conversations with consumers though, you learned quality was also an important factor — that should be an important piece of your content strategy.

Step 2: Map Content to the Funnel

You should have walked away from step one with some core content topics, pillars, or themes to focus on, which will meet both your business’ and your potential consumers’ needs. The next step is having more conversations in order to map the buyer journey with potential content topics that service those needs, and provide value at the right time.

Leaning on detailed buyer personas will help you (and if you don’t have them already, you should create them), as well as the templates provided above as a guide. It’s important to note that you might not have to focus on the whole buyer journey: If you’re having trouble converting consumers at the consideration stage, for example, start there and branch out as your needs inevitably change.

Step 3: Choose Your Content Types

There are so many content marketing types to choose from, it can be a bit overwhelming. Each type of content provides a unique storytelling platform in order to get your message across to potential consumers. Personally, I think the easiest way to break into content marketing is to start publishing helpful articles. You can launch a blog for free, and it provides you the best opportunity to start collecting email subscribers.

In addition, a publishing site can host a ton of different types of content other than articles, such as case studies, infographics, and videos, if you want to experiment as you grow. There are lists of content types out there that span a number from 13 to over 100, but I think this list from Larry Kim sums them up pretty well:

Step 4: Content and Distribution Strategy

The final step is to take all of this information you’ve gathered and document a plan. There is no one-size-fits-all content strategy template: Some people like to create written documentation, but I prefer a deck of some sort, since they’re easy to pull out in meetings to help you brainstorm, explain, and pivot as you go.

Your content strategy should outline all of the information you’ve gathered so far, as well as a distribution strategy that covers the following:

• Distribution channels.
• Budget for distribution (if any).
• KPIs that relate to your defined business needs.
• Measurement plan.

The final step is creating an action plan. Create a content calendar to keep you on track for creation and distribution of content. You can use a tool of some sort, or get started in a spreadsheet. My content calendar has changed depending on the company I’ve been working with, but I’ve always thought that this basic example from the Content Marketing Institute is a good place to start:

Once you’ve completed the discovery and planning stages, the next step is to dive into content creation. I’m going to focus on text-based content, as it’s the easiest to get started with and has the least amount of financial barriers for

Marketers.

How to Engage Your Target Audience With Content Marketing

The best advice I’ve heard regarding content creation came from Neil Patel: “The best content is content you want to read. The best content you would pay to read.” If you wouldn’t personally pay to read it, make more edits until you would.

That’s easier said than done, of course. Writing engaging content is another topic in which probably thousands of books have been written, but I’ll dive into a basic starting point. Whatever kind of content you’re writing, it always starts with an idea, and once you’ve got an idea to work with, it’s time to sit down to write. Every piece of content, whether it’s a blog post, landing page, email, or another content type should follow this basic flow:

• Push on the person’s pain point.
• Agitate that pain.
• Solve their problem.

Take this example from First Round Capital’s blog, The First Round Review. Their article, “The One Tool Startups Need to Brainstorm, Test and Win” does this well. Let’s break it down on an incredibly basic level:

• Pain point push: Startups need a business model that works, while also operating lean.
• Pain point agitation: Your first business model is going to fail.
• Solution: A detailed description of the business model canvas.

Using this basic outline, they’ve gripped their audience from the start, agitated a pain point to convince them to stick around, then solved that pain point elegantly.

This is also an example of the content type I recommended starting with — a written article. Once you’ve determined the message that will flow from the three pillars above, here’s how to write one step-by-step:

• Collect all of the information needed. Are you showcasing proprietary data? Interviewing one of your company’s thought leaders? Collecting data from the industry? Start there, and collect it all in one messy document.
• Outline your post. Include multiple options for a headline (I’d bet your first is never the one you choose) and all section headers. Drop in the information from your messy document where it belongs.
• Draft your copy. What you want to say is already on the page, so now, sit down and let the words flow.
• Have at least one other person read it, including all necessary stakeholders. You should never publish anything that hasn’t been seen by a second pair of eyes.
• Publish.

How To Measure Your Content Marketing Efforts

In a perfect world, we’d like to be able to see consumers interact with initial content, subscribe, interact with more content, and then purchase. In reality, though, it’s tough to quantify the exact impact that content had on that consumer. Was it the blog post that convinced them? The ad they saw? Or the sales person?

When it comes to content marketing, it’s likely it was some combination of factors. Measuring content marketing efforts requires some appreciation of nuance and a willingness to consider a range of measurements and data to understand whether you’re succeeding.

Here are the areas of measurement to keep in mind when you’re gauging content marketing efforts:

1. Content ecosystem growth

Tried-and-true web and SEO metrics are part of every content marketer’s tool kit. Ideally, you’ll see sustained, continual growth in these metrics as you build a content marketing program. Individual pieces should show immediate growth, while publishing fresh content regularly on your company’s website helps with long-term growth and to build domain authority and increased organic search traffic. These are some common growth metrics to track in content marketing:

• Page views.
• Site visits.
• Repeat site visitors.
• Variety of traffic sources.
• Organic search traffic.
• Keyword authority.

2. Content engagement

As you delve deeper into understanding the audience members who are reading, sharing, and acting on your content, consider tracking engagement metrics in addition to web growth numbers. Engagement can come in many forms across channels in our modern world, so it’s important to capture all the many ways that you might hear from customers and prospects. Content marketing engagement metrics include:

• Email open rates.
• Clickthrough rates (emails and CTA buttons).
• Social media comments.
• Social media shares and reposts.
• Poll or survey responses.
• Signups, such as email subscriptions.
• Downloads or other web actions.

3. Content influence

Along the journey from a user’s first interaction with a company to their first purchase (and ideally many more to come), content plays an important role. It’s not always simple to quantify — you may not be able to gauge whether a blog post led directly to a sale — which is why metrics like “influenced pipeline” can serve a content marketer well. Use tracking and scoring tools, such as UTM codes, CRM source codes, or dedicated landing pages, to give weight to content along the customer journey, so you can see if there’s a particular piece of content that shows up most often on the way to a purchase.

Influenced pipeline as a metric can be more challenging to capture than straightforward web metrics, so consider all the tools at your disposal to understand the role content marketing plays in sales and customer retention. Some data teams are able to assess user journeys and content touchpoints, or look for software or consulting firms that can offer multi-touch attribution to get this type of user insight.

Key Takeaways

Your content marketing function can be as big or as small as you see fit, but one thing should always be your guiding light — providing genuinely valuable content that’s empathetic to your audience’s needs. Over time, you’ll see that all of the work you put into content will surely pay off.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Does your business need content marketing?

Whatever the size and industry of your business, content marketing will play an essential role. Remember that it can (and should) be tailored to meet your business’ goals and the needs of your audience and customers.

With limited resources, for example, you might create one educational whitepaper, then repurpose its sections and create an ongoing social campaign for promotion.

Another business may focus on creating, promoting, and reusing videos to educate and entertain prospects. Content marketing is a necessary piece of marketing for any business, and it isn’t a one-size-fits-all discipline.

What does a content marketer do?

A modern content marketer will likely bring many editorial skills to their role, along with creativity and resourcefulness. A content marketer creates written content across formats and channels, but they also handle content planning, both short and long term, including editorial calendaring, scheduling publication and posting, and other tactics.

This role also includes brainstorming new concepts or new ways to address the needs of the business with content, as well as collaborating with other marketers to create and execute campaigns. Content marketers work closely with designers, web teams, product teams, and others to inform the creation of new content.

Finally, a content marketer is constantly capturing performance metrics to learn from the data and refine content strategy accordingly.

What is content marketing vs. social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a discipline that focuses on only one channel, and may be considered a subset of content marketing. Social media marketing and content marketing teams should work in tandem to ensure that they are in sync on branding, voice and tone, and timely messaging.

A content marketing team often creates content to publish on social media, or uses social media as a promotional channel. The social media team constantly monitors social media to engage with followers, in addition to strategic marketing work to create social media posts that capture trends and express a company’s voice and message in an organic way.