The content marketing is about creating informative and useful content and releasing it on different medias in order to catch attention of potential clients. This content can be on multiple formats: videos, articles, white papers, infographics, guides, studies, blogs, pictures…

Here are most important aspects of content marketing that lead to good results.

In the facts, it is widely used on internet thanks to the ease to share and spread content.

The content marketing is the first step in the inbound marketing process.

1) Create useful and unique content

To create content, brands have to be creative: you can’t just talk only about your services or products. It won’t be very interesting for your visitors and potential customers. You have to deliver trustful information. The quality of your content is defined by the value you added for your audience.

Moreover, new content have to be produced all the time and have to be diversified. This is a real challenge for copywriters and web-marketers.

2) Make it sharable

Once the content is produced, brands have to make it sharable. Indeed, social networks allow contents to go viral. It’s important to give the chance to readers to share the content they like with their family, friends, workmates… You can even invite them to do so (never underestimate the call-to-action. The more your content is shared, the more it will be visible, which is the original goal. So make sure that sharing options are viewed in your template.

3) Select and target your audience

As internet is a very wide space, it would be a waste of time and energy to distribute this valuable content anywhere without thinking of where the audience is. If you target young people, Facebook might be interesting for you. If you target other professional, LinkedIn would probably be more accurate.

But your target might not be on the internet, so create concrete content for them. Think about the Michelins Guides, it is a very good example of content marketing developed a century ago.

4) Spread the word

1) SEO: It’s time to spread these good words. As told before, the easiest way is internet. Usually the content appears first on the blog of the company, then is shared all around. This step has to be done concurrently with a good SEO strategy, otherwise all this fabulous content will never appear in search engines.

2) SMO: The content can also be released via social medias. SMO’s competencies of the community manager will make it visible through networks. Some formats, such as infographics  or videos, are famous to create easily engagement, but it is a bigger investment to produce it.

Anyway, don’t underestimate one of these two aspects: SEO and SMO are important and complement one another.

5) Create content for each step of the conversion

1) Be discovered: At first, maybe visitors don’t even know about your brand, your company. So give them some content which explain who  you are and what you do. This content have to be seen by a maximum of people, so use social networks, specialize website, or any space with a wide visibility.

2) Be liked: Then, produce content about your products or services, and why they are good. The goal is to create a good feeling for leads about your brand. Information will be less visible than the one in the previous step. But they still have to be found easily. The website or the blog of the company could be the place where your audience expect to find this content.

3) Close the deal: Finally, the last content that will convince your potential customers to buy. So according to your business sector, it might be: technical specifications, special offers, product’s review, interview of happy customers…

In a next article, I will explain how to link all these contents to set up a real inbound marketing process.

About being sharable, you can share my articles on your favorite social network!