Must-Know Strategy: Content Marketing

Content marketing is the hottest buzz phrase in marketing right now, but many people are confused about what exactly it means, let alone how to implement it. In the most simple terms possible, content marketing is the act of creating information products to promote your business, and spreading them throughout the world using multiple media channels.

First, let's address why you should be using content marketing to promote your business:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO used to be a relatively simple action that you took care of on your own website, but now you need to have multiple (meaningful) links to your website in order to be relevant to Google. Content marketing is the best way to get external links to your website.

2. Reach: Since every website knows that it needs content to increase SEO, blogs, news outlets, other websites and social media sites are looking for content. If you are able to provide them with your content, then it's a win-win situation: they get content, and you get both links and the eyeballs of the people who they already reach.

3. Lead Generation: Most content strategies can directly drive lead generation, which is ultimately marketing's job. When you create content, you have many opportunities to structure it so that you drive leads.

Next, it's important to recognize that there are two media channels of which you should be aware:

Owned Media: These are the places where you control your content 100%, including your website, enewsletter, blog, and social media channels (your profile on Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Other Media: These are places controlled by other people and companies, including other people's websites, enewsletters, blogs, news outlets and social media connections (the people with whom you are connected on Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Finally, you need to build a "Content Library" that you can use for both owned media and other media. You don't have to build all of these, and you may want to consider some other options, but these are the top 6 ingredients to a good content library:

1. Articles
2. Videos
3. White Papers
4. Webinars
5. Infographics
6. Books (including eBooks)

The most important thing about content marketing is that you 1) must do it; and 2) need to have a schedule to do it correctly.

There are hundreds of ways you can develop your content marketing strategy; here is an infographic to help you get started:

View this information on SlideShare for more details:

Content Marketing 2014 from Virginia Ginsburg