Content marketing is a strategy and business process that uses valuable and relevant digital assets like text, images, and video to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
In this guide:
- What is content marketing?
- Why is content marketing important?
- Types of content marketing
- How does content marketing work?
- What is content management personalization?
- How to do content marketing
- Empower your content marketing with Adobe Experience Manager
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the creation and strategic distribution of thought leadership and instructive materials that educate and interest the audience.
Content marketing assets come in four basic forms — written, audio, video, and image.
Most businesses use several forms of content to engage with their audiences across platforms like social media, websites, and ads.
Content marketing is a great way to improve brand awareness and build trust with customers. Once trust has been established, customers are typically more open to engaging with product- and feature-specific content like demos, reviews, and brochures.
With a strong content marketing function in place, high-tech buyers effectively sell themselves. Sales reps then take on a more consultative role, helping prospective customers work through challenging use cases and product questions.
Why is content marketing important?
The world is transitioning to a point where customers are fatigued by irrelevant messaging thrown at them. Content marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming customers with advertising-laden messaging, it provides them with valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey.
The benefits of content marketing
Useful content helps customers navigate their journey from awareness through consideration and beyond. A well-run content marketing program can deliver many benefits for high-tech companies, including:
- Demonstrating credibility by sharing thought leadership on relevant topics
- Improving SEO by highlighting trending topics in the industry
- Sparking curiosity that leads prospects to seek out product demos
- Retaining customers and improving brand loyalty
- Fine-tuning messaging to suit current market conditions
- Decreasing marketing costs to improve ROI
- Retaining customers and building brand loyalty
Content marketing isn’t new, and it’s not slowing down. It all comes down to choosing the right mix of personalized content marketing media that will turn more heads.
Types of content marketing
Blogs
Blogs are written resources that businesses use to promote their products, discuss trending topics, or demonstrate thought leadership. Most businesses publish blogs for their own websites, but it’s also common to create guest blogs for other websites as a link-building opportunity.
While blogs are primarily text-based, businesses will often create custom images and videos for their blogs to increase reader engagement.
Blog posts are one of the most popular forms of content marketing because they help businesses stand out to both human readers and search engines. Blogging is a beneficial addition to any content marketing strategy because it’s affordable to produce, search engine-friendly, and simpler to create than multimedia like video.
To get the most value out of blogging, you should focus on just one topic per blog article. It’s also a good idea to create a mix of short-form (500 to 1,000 words), medium-form (1,200 to 2,000 words), and long-form content (more than 2,000 words).
However, remember that longer isn’t always better. If you take too long to get to the point, you’ll lose readers. Make sure your long-form content offers a lot of value. It’s also a good idea to use plenty of headers, bullets, and bolded text to keep readers engaged.
Video
Whether it’s on your website or on a platform like TikTok or YouTube, video allows brands to communicate complex ideas and feelings with their audience in just a few seconds. Smartphones have made it more affordable to create branded videos quickly, all while increasing the quality of content through visuals, music, and voiceovers.
Many businesses use video to share product demos, distribute customer testimonials, tell their employees’ stories, or announce new features. Some businesses use video to create immersive experiences, like fun concerts or game shows, to deepen their relationships with viewers.
Although brands have historically been hesitant to produce their own video, every company should add video to its content marketing plan. Multimedia is gaining steam because it’s easier for consumers to digest and share with their friends.
It’s also possible to convert a 10-minute video into other forms of content, like blogs and social media posts. In this way, investing in video can significantly speed up your other content marketing efforts.
Podcasts
Podcast content marketing allows businesses to reach out to niche audiences through the power of audio-first content.
Businesses can create a podcast of their own or star as guests on other podcasts in their industry to connect with more potential customers. In a branded podcast, businesses primarily offer solutions to audience pain points, but they also frequently feature customer stories, industry trends, case studies, and other narratives that create an emotional connection with their listeners.
Many businesses overlook the power of podcasting because they aren’t sure how to use audio-only content. But podcasts are a growing platform for businesses to reach their customers.
Social media
Social media marketing is an offshoot of content marketing that creates content and shares it via relevant social platforms. With social media marketing, brands post text, images, and video content on social media platforms.
Most businesses choose a mix of social media that are most relevant to their audience’s interests, but popular platforms include Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube. B2B brands also see a lot of success on Linkedin and X.
Social media is a beneficial form of content marketing that helps businesses socialize and engage with customers wherever they are. Instead of trying to engage with shoppers via email or your website, you can share updates and fun content on social media to engage your target audience.
This makes it possible for your followers to share your content and hopefully help your business go viral with greater reach. Best of all, social media can become an organic or paid referral channel that funnels traffic to your website regularly.
Infographics
Infographics are a type of content marketing that compiles interesting statistics and facts into a pleasing visual format. Infographics are a mainstay of B2B content marketing, but they’re useful in some B2C applications, especially for sharing instructions or product features. Often, businesses take existing content, like a study or survey results, and transform its high-level points into an easily digestible infographic.
Infographics are helpful because they distill big concepts into engaging visuals that are easy to read and share. Today’s audiences crave skimmable content, and infographics make your brand’s content easier to consume in less time. Plus, businesses can crop the original infographic into smaller images, which are perfect for resharing on social media.
Tools like Adobe Express make it even easier to create quality infographics in less time.
How does content marketing work?
Once you’ve decided on the types of content marketing your business will create, it’s time to build a content marketing strategy. The purpose of content marketing is to deepen relationships and solve problems, so every content marketing strategy should address the three stages of content marketing.
1. Awareness
The awareness stage is the first step of every customer journey. This is when customers become aware of an issue or a problem they have. At this stage, content marketing should focus on customer needs and pain points without overly promoting your solutions or products. The best types of content for the awareness stage include blogs answering common questions with an FAQ, informative how-to videos, or high-level eBooks.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, your audience knows they have a problem and begins looking for solutions. Businesses should still deliver value with their content marketing at this stage, but they can now add a few well-placed promotions within the content. The best types of content for this stage include helpful infographics and how-to blogs.
3. Decision
In the decision stage, your audience decides whether they’re going to choose your solution or not. This is the stage when your content marketing should lean more heavily into sales-related content. Content like comparison lists, customer testimonials, product demo videos, and buyer guides do well at this stage. Businesses can also use retargeted paid ads to bring lost leads back into the fold.
What is content management personalization?
The goal of personalization in marketing is to offer the right content to the right people at the right time. This requires customer data, marketing workflow management, and automation. High-tech organizations may use several types of data to personalize their customer experience:
- Persona, job title, and industry
- User preference centers, purchase histories, and search histories
- Local events and regional trends
- Gender, age, and other demographics
Content can be developed to meet the needs of different personas within the audience. A security solutions provider might offer an article on endpoint security to an IT director when they’re researching upcoming network security conferences. Likewise, a gaming console company might share an article about upcoming local gaming events with customers in a specific region.
How to do content marketing
1. Know who your customers are
Companies need to make sure they understand their audience and know how to engage with them. Customer segmentation allows companies to build detailed views of their customers with buyer personas.
These personas not only help the company understand its customers but also identify the types of content that will best resonate with different customer segments.
By activating and acting on these personas, a company can successfully communicate with its audience, build trust, and find new customers.
2. Figure out what information they’ll need
The next step is to determine what information is necessary to connect customers with your product, brand, or service.
Identify your audience’s pain points so you better understand their priorities, challenges, and preferences. From there, your content marketing strategy should answer common questions and solve your audience’s problems.
The better your content solves a problem, the more likely your audience is to engage with you.
3. Decide how to deliver that information
Once you know your customer and what they need, you’ll need to deliver content via the best medium for your target audience. For example, if your customer personas reveal that your ideal buyers spend a lot of time on Facebook, it means you should deliver content on that platform.
By going where your audience spends their time online, you can ensure they see your content and engage with your brand.
4. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for success
Content marketing is effective, but attribution isn’t always simple. Businesses should establish content marketing KPIs to help them understand how their content is performing.
However, the KPIs you choose will depend on your goals. Some businesses track content engagement, like views and comments, while others look for conversions.
The key is to set measurable, realistic KPIs for your business.
5. Create engaging content
You need to create professional content that entertains and informs your audience. Follow these tips to create better content:
- Create clear, well-written content that doesn’t rely on jargon.
- Deliver value to your audience, whether in the form of actionable tips, discounts, or insider information.
- Create different pieces of content for customers at different stages of the funnel.
- Ensure your content works with the channel you’re using. You can reuse the same ideas in a blog for social media, but you might have to adjust it to communicate better with users on a different platform.
6. Set a schedule
Your business needs to release content on a consistent basis to attract both regular traffic and search engine crawlers. Creating a posting schedule can help you release content regularly, but be realistic. It’s easy to be overly ambitious, so start with one blog post or video a week.
7. Set a budget
While content marketing is one of the most affordable forms of marketing, it isn’t free. Businesses should always set a budget for their content marketing initiatives so they can measure return on investment (ROI). Create a budget for hiring freelancers, buying content tools, and running paid ads to control your spending.
8. Analyze and measure results
Make sure you regularly sit down with your marketing team to review how your content marketing efforts stack up against your target KPIs. Analyzing and measuring your performance can help you understand which pieces perform better, which can ultimately help you create stronger content. It also allows marketers to shift their budget toward more successful types of content and away from underperforming projects.
Empower your content marketing with Adobe Experience Manager
When you’re ready to get started, evaluate your marketing team’s capacity for creating and managing content marketing campaigns. If you desire an all-in-one integrated platform, Adobe Experience Manager can help in the form of Experience Manager Assets, Experience Manager Sites, and Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing.
With Experience Manager Content Management, you can bring millions of personalized experiences to life. Experience Manager Sites is a marketer- and developer-friendly content management system (CMS) built to deliver personalized experiences to any audience on any channel — without having to compromise on speed or scale.
Watch the Adobe Experience Manager overview video to learn more.
