Content Marketing: What Is It?
Subtitle: Content Marketing Explained: How Brands Attract and Retain Customers Through Valuable Content
Metadescription: Discover what content marketing is and how it plays a crucial role in digital marketing. Learn about content marketing strategies, roles, and how to create impactful content that attracts and retains customers.
Digital marketing as a whole is an incredibly broad field; from paid media to copywriting, marketers can wear a lot of hats–and there’s a reason why. It’s a field that’s constantly evolving and trying to find new ways to connect with audiences through innovative campaigns. And this is exactly where content marketing comes into play: content marketing is a brand of digital marketing that focuses on creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.
Although you might be thinking of simply writing ad copy, content marketing can take on a lot of forms. Let’s check out a few:
Written content, such as emails, newsletters, blog posts, and social media posts.
Visual content, such as infographics, social media posts, and videos.
Audio content, such as podcasts or social media videos.
Before we dive right into content marketing and what content marketers do on a daily basis, let’s cover an important question: why is content marketing important?
Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash
Why is Content Marketing Important?
Apart from the obvious benefit of attracting more potential customers to your brand, content marketing serves an important purpose across every aspect of marketing campaigns. Incorporating smart content marketing into these areas leads to the following:
Content strategy: you want to provide your users with valuable and relevant content that shares why your product or service is of interest to them and responds to a need they have. Therefore, carefully planning out our content strategy will help you better meet client wants and needs.
SEO strategy: you know that search engine optimization is a crucial part of ensuring your content is ranking well and attracting visitors; one of the most common indicators of SEO ranking is if a company is producing quality and original content.
Inboard strategy: users want to feel cared for and special and with carefully developed inbound marketing strategies based on quality content, you’ll attract more customers to your brand–and retain those you already have.
What Does a Content Marketer Do?
Does this sound like a fit so far? We’re happy to hear it! Let’s dive into the goals behind content marketing strategies, which will help you decide if these goals align with your aspirations.
Quality brand content can be extremely beneficial–or dangerous–and that’s why content marketing is known for doing the following:
Improving brand reputation: want to be seen as an expert in a specific field? Great–it’s time to create expert content that provides value to users and makes them believe in what you’re offering. On the other hand, creating lazy or false content can seriously damage your brand’s reputation.
Expanding your audience: quality content is content that’s shared and talked about and investing in a content marketing strategy can help your brand find new audiences.
Improving company/client relationships: every customer wants to feel individual and special and content that’s specifically tailored to your audience can help meet this very important desire for personalized content.
Promoting specific products or services: this is the most obvious use of content marketing, but it’s sometimes forgotten in the rush for prime SEO positioning. Content marketing is a valuable way to promote specific products and services for brands that are trying to reach new audiences.
Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash
Roles in content marketing
Still seem like a great fit? Then it’s time to dive even further into content marketing and discuss some of the different roles within this field that could be your next step. Remember that although there are quite a few different positions, each has their own specific focus and finding the one that matches your skill set is crucial.
Content strategist/content manager
Are you interested in the more strategic side of content marketing? Then a role as a content strategist or content manager is probably perfect for you: in this role, you’ll develop the team’s content strategy based on current goals and standing, working to improve ranking, conversion, reputation, and more.
Content creator/copywriter
Is creativity more up your alley? Perfect: roles as a content creator or copywriter will allow you to let your creativity run loose, creating fun and engaging content in multiple formats that will attract more users.
From Head of Marketing to Content Marketing Specialists, there are certainly many more roles that fall under the umbrella of content marketing; however, each company will have specific responsibilities for their content marketing team and it’s important to check them out before applying for a role.
Source: Semrush
Becoming a Content Marketer
The exact path to becoming a content marketer will depend on your expertise and career aspirations, but expertise in the following areas will set you up for success:
Writing: superb writing skills isn’t a necessity just for copywriters; all marketers should have a solid foundation of writing skills so that they’re able to deliver effective and error-free copy for campaigns.
Analytics: marketers don’t need to be data experts, but they should have a basis in data analytics that allows them to understand their campaign’s progress and what changes should be made.
SEO: your site’s ranking is ultimately very important and understanding both how search engines evaluate content and what you can do to improve it is an essential aspect of content marketing.
Storytelling: apart from being good writers, marketers must be able to keep audiences engaged and interested in their content through storytelling abilities.
These skills are a great place to start if you want to start your journey into being a content marketer. The field is growing and no matter your previous experience or knowledge, there is definitely a role for you in marketing. Ready to take the plunge? We believe in you.
Further Resources
About the Author:
Juliette Carreiro is a tech writer, with two years of experience writing in-depth articles for Ironhack. Covering everything from career advice and navigating the job ladder, to the future impact of AI in the global tech space, Juliette is the go-to for Ironhack’s community of aspiring tech professionals.
