What is content marketing?

There are dozens of books, hundreds of blogs and podcasts, countless events and thousands of self-proclaimed experts on the topic of content marketing. So it's time to present from our perspective what content marketing actually is and what it has to do with the Content Creation has on itself.

Content marketing definition

According to Wikipedia is content marketing: "Content marketing is a marketing technique designed to engage target audiences with informative, advisory, and entertaining content in order to convince them of one's company and its service offering or brand and to attract or retain them as customers."

The american version is broader in scope: "Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It is often used by businesses in order to achieve the following goals: attract attention and generate leads, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users. Content marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. It helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future."

Here, a significant difference becomes visible, as the brand or branding are integrated as well. Methods that are used here are storytelling, the hero's journey, the Epiphany Bridge and several others that are often derived from the narrative patterns of Hollywood films.

Is that content marketing? From our point of view, no.

For us, content marketing is a marketing strategy that uses high-quality on-page content to engage target audiences and potential customers, which often leads to links from high-quality websites, more leads, and improved search engine optimization.

This content focuses on a high utility value for the users with low branding shares. Promotion is in the background, even if the brand attributes are known to the content creator. They are a basis for the creation. The high-quality content thus implicitly pays into the brand values. This type of content increases dwell time and interactions on the website at all stages of the sales funnel.

Since this method is cost-effective compared to placing online ads and has a lasting effect, more and more companies are using it.

What are the components of content marketing?

Content marketing is versatile. It can range from a whitepaper to a large-scale viral campaign.

Sample contents include:

• Infographics
• E-books
• Whitepaper
• Social media
• Case studies
• Webinars
• Blogs
• Podcasts
• …

The essential building blocks of content marketing are:

• Content strategy: Without content strategy, content marketing is aimless. It is essential to align all measures, define the content to be created and determine when and where it should appear. Monitoring results, starting with the status quo, is also defined here. Essential components are:
  • Target group analysis (personas and customer journey)
  • Target setting (channels, number of posts, leads)
  • Branding as a basis (brand characteristics, central message, Employer Branding)
  • SEO Status Quo
  • Content audit
  • Competitive environment
  • Benchmarks
  • Industry Trends
  • Distribution plan
  • Editorial plan
  • Results monitoring
  • Roles and responsibilities
• SEO: Search engines evaluate the quality of the content, the so-called. SEO ContentAmong other things, this is based on the length of time users spend on the page. The higher the quality, the higher the pages are ranked.
• SEA: Search engine advertising can be considered part of content marketing. The ads themselves need crisp texts that encourage clicks. And the target pages need to be filled with content, often using lead magnets to convert the expensively purchased visitor directly into a registered lead.
• Content creation: Here we distinguish between two fundamentally different types of content:
  • In the foreground of the website is all the content for the sales funnel. The content can be completely different, depending on whether the potential customer is still in the exploration phase or already knows exactly what he wants. In any case, it has a high utility value for the potential customer and should rank as high as possible in Google.
  • To achieve this, the second content type is high-quality special content for journalists and influencers. The goal of this content is to spread the word and thus get backlinks that will make the entire page move higher in the ranking.
• Public and influencer relations: Journalists and influencers are interested in the topics of their readers. They are usually not interested in the latest company news. It is a common mistake in social media marketing to focus on news from the company. The focus should rather be on the added values of the products and services for the users and their significance. This gives you the chance to get high-quality backlinks.

What makes a Content marketing agency?

There are different types of content marketing agencies. Basically, one can distinguish between two types of agencies, which again include various subgroups and special providers:

• On the one hand, there are agencies that come more from PR and journalism. Their focus is on the brand and storytelling. Here, texts are primarily created with suitable illustrations and high-quality image films.
• The second type thinks completely digitally, focuses on the needs of users, consistently uses data analysis and creates all types of content that is digitally relevant. The range of tasks is thus much broader, but the focus is more specifically on increasing relevant traffic and generating leads.

We belong to the second group. We would be happy to show you which content marketing services we use to significantly increase traffic from Google to your website.