What Is Content Marketing? 3 Important Tips For 2019

What's up, everybody. So today, we're going to ahead and try to answer that super high level question, what is content marketing. There is a ton of interest and energy and passion around content marketing now. There's a lot of people that are really doing this right and seen massive results from this, a lot of people that are failing as well. So stay for the whole video because we're going to go through the exact step by step process about understanding what content marketing fundamentally is and how it works. I'm Tommy Griffith with clickminded.com. Let's get going. All right. So let's dig in here. What is content marketing? So we'll start at the very, very top of the very basics around what this is. So first I'm going to talk about the differences between content marketing and copywriting because they are absolutely not the same thing.

So let's define both of these before we get started. Content marketing is the act of owning, as opposed to renting media. So this is very different. Content marketing is the act of owning, as opposed to renting your media. So this is designed ... content marketing is designed to acquire and convert a very specific target market with a clear, direct, single action, a clear, direct, single, next thing to do. So do keep that in mind with content marketing. We use content marketing as a channel because we can make a meaningful and measurable impact on our business. We don't do this because it's sexy, we don't do it because it's cool, we don't do it because BuzzFeed is doing it. We only want to do this if we can make a meaningful, measurable impact on our business. So not everyone might necessarily need to or should invest in content marketing. You only want to do this if you can measurably impact your business in a positive way.

Copyrighting, on the other hand, is the act of creating text that converts traffic into leads and leads into customers. So this is a very different thing. This is the actual copy, the actual text on the page that's kind of optimized to get users to do the action that we want them to do. Good copywriting convinces a prospect to take an action. That's what copywriting is. You're kind of compelling the user to do something. Content marketing is not copyright and copyright is not content marketing.

However, content marketing should utilize great copywriting, and copywriting should be part of a content marketing strategy. So these are not the same thing, but do keep that in mind that they both work synergistically together. Like social media, there are many different vanity metrics that are sure over-emphasized in content marketing. In isolation, these metrics are not very useful at all, likes, followers, comments, retweets, fans, sparkles, warcraft gold, friendship points, hamburgers. Whatever platform you're on, there are a ton of vanity metrics around it. If they don't tie back directly to your business, they're not useful. I can't tell you the number of people I meet that talk about their Instagram followers, but then don't talk about the follow up to their business. And so there's a lot of that in content marketing as well, so do keep that in mind. Just because your stuff gets retweeted and pushed out a lot, does not necessarily mean it's good. Let's get to some old school examples.

In the path where we have this, like old school and old rock band. We have the Beatles on the Johnny Carson Show, then we have advertising in-between. So we have this kind of content and then the advertising in the 30 second spots or 30 second commercial. Another one, we have an old school Vogue magazine where we have this kind of like content for the user where the user is buying the subscription, and in between the content, there's these advertisements of old school. This is badasses Camel cigarettes. This is old school advertising that are in between the content. Now, we we have the actual content, which might be a soccer game, and then we have the jerseys on the actual players, is the advertising as well. So there's another kind of old school example, kind of sponsoring. It's more modern day but still an old school example of kind of sponsoring the user there.

Still another old school example even though it's a modern version of it, we have an article, it's on cnbc.com. We're giving the user a bunch of content, and then we have advertising plastered on the site, our old school examples of how advertising work. Content marketing is content and advertising. Here's sumo.com, they have this great post of how to boost your email opt-in rate by 664% in 24 hours. Then we have the opt-in at the top right, enter your site URL here. So this content is owned by the advertiser in content marketing. So that's kind of the high level overview of what content marketing is. It's that the content is the advertising. The advertiser is creating the actual content. It's not the old school version where you have a TV program and then the commercial, or a magazine and then the advertisement. It's where the advertiser is creating the content as well. So that's what content marketing fundamentally is. Let's take a look at a good content marketing framework for you if this is something you're looking to invest in.

Cool. So content marketing applies to every stage of the funnel. So if you've set up your sales funnel, you know how it works, you have your buyer persona or your customer avatar, and you have each phase of the phone and that's clearly defined you can use content marketing for each phase of the funnel that's clearly defined. You can use content marketing for each phase of that funnel. So here's a funnel. The funnels look a little bit different based on your business. Every business has a slightly different funnel, but here's kind of a generic one. The top of funnel is the awareness phase, the middle funnel's the consideration phase, the bottom funnel's a conversion phase. And then once you convert that user, that's kind of monetization, retention and love. So top of funnel's awareness. The things we might be doing would be acquiring new visitors and segmenting them.

The middle funnel's consideration, that's driving visitors back to the site, getting them to come back two, three, four or five times. The bottom funnel is actually converting them with our core offer. And then monetization and retention is getting users to buy again, and again, and again and making sure they're happy advocates of the business. All right. So let's take a look at some content marketing examples at each stage of the funnel. First is top of funnel content. So some of the content that we could create for our content marketing strategy, top of funnel, might be blog posts, might be videos, which you're watching right now. It could be podcasts or social posts. The metrics we might monitor for these things might be traffic, pixeling our users, on-site, or maybe inbound links to that content.

Middle funnel content. All of the stuff we would do for people in the middle funnel might be lead magnets, give me your email in exchange for this thing, it might be tools, or downloads, or webinars visit, something like that, and the metrics we might be monitoring are pixeling, email list growth or email campaign could click through rate, or tripwire conversion rate, something like that. Our bottom funnel content. We have to take a look at that . So that means something like a free trial. Depends on your business a little bit, but a free trial, a tripwire, kind of a low dollar product, maybe a webinar of a 30 minute call, "Click here to book a free consultation", something like that.

Our metrics here might be our core offer conversions, maybe your email campaign click through rate, or average order value, maybe something like our user lifetime value, all metrics you might monitor for a bottom funnel content. So that's really a high level overview of what content marketing is. Again as a summary, content marketing is when the advertiser is the one creating the content. You could have content marketing at each stage of the funnel, and you're going to want to be kind of monitoring different metrics, moving each user down each stage of the funnel for your content marketing strategy. So that's it, trying to answer the question what is content marketing. I hope we did it for you. So I hope that was helpful.

If it was useful, if you learned something today, go ahead and click subscribe down below to get even more digital marketing tactics and tips from us. If you're on YouTube, I would love a comment. What do you think? Was this helpful? You understand what content marketing is now? If you have any other questions, go ahead leave a comment right now. I read every single one. Finally, if you want a comprehensive overview of what content marketing is, along with all of our content marketing resources on our site, go out and click that link down below to clickminded.com. We have content marketing SOPs, downloadable cheat sheets for you, go and click that link right now. Thanks a lot. .

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