What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the marketing of content. It involves promoting oneself online by adding interesting, engaging, and useful content in various forms. These pieces are meant to serve as advertising messages and attract the attention of audiences looking for information in a specific thematic group – and thus they can potentially become our clients. Content marketing is an organized form of online advertising. It is most often applied in the long term, defining a certain strategy. We can also use content marketing independently and occasionally if we do not want to base our advertising efforts solely on it. Content marketing has many benefits and can be utilized by any individual or brand whether they are promoting their private project or a commercial business.

The main premise of content marketing is to attract with content, which is why it is so effective. In this form of advertising, we offer audiences useful content that they can find on their own, and then they may become interested in the brand that provided it. This strategy allows us to attract quality traffic from people who are genuinely interested in our brand and the specific topic and express their consent to be presented with our offer.

The content we publish to engage potential audiences, regardless of its form, should primarily be correct, high-quality, substantive, and provide concrete benefits to the audience. We can prepare the content ourselves or we can commission it from copywriters or freelancers. If we do not want to be involved in creating content and its publication ourselves, we can order a content marketing service from marketing and interactive agencies.

Who can benefit from it and when is it worth implementing?

Content marketing should primarily be used by individuals who care about building a quality and professional image. Acquiring clients in this way will certainly be much better than publishing intrusive ads or mass low-quality advertising messages aimed solely at gaining a large number of unknown audiences. It is also worthwhile to leverage content marketing if we are interested in long-term advertising efforts. Adding content online in many places will yield benefits for a very long time regularly, while effectively utilizing the budget for publishing specific content.

Content marketing should also be utilized by those who aim to reach a specific target group, as the natural targeting that occurs with this form of advertising is very precise. A very good idea for using content marketing is when we want to build the image of a professional, an expert, or a leader in the industry. Publishing content will certainly help us establish such an image among the audience.

What benefits does content marketing provide?

Content marketing offers a wide range of benefits that we can gain by promoting ourselves online in this way. Certainly, these include image benefits and building a positive brand image which can serve as added value or be the main goal in itself. No other form of online advertising builds a positive image as effectively as publishing quality content for free to the audiences.

Once content is added online, it remains there for a very long time. This means that we can derive passive benefits from once published promotional messages. By promoting ourselves passively, we invest in benefits that we will gain in the future, and we do not stop gaining profits from such advertising after the current advertising campaign ends, as happens, for example, with promoting through Google Ads or other advertising systems. This process also allows us to effectively utilize our budget and achieve a very attractive acquisition cost per client, which will decrease over time to ultimately become exceptionally appealing.

Content marketing is also, or perhaps primarily, about effectiveness. Audiences, finding our content on the internet, will not feel pressured and will engage with the useful information. All of this will translate into a willingness to check our brand's offerings, and consequently impact purchasing decisions. Content marketing allows for natural targeting, meaning reaching an audience interested in a specific topic. With this promoting option online, we do not need to define the target audience ourselves and risk misidentifying them; instead, the audience essentially targets themselves. Consequently, we can also reach audiences that we would not have independently identified as interested in our brand.

Promoting oneself through adding content online is very simple. We can do this ourselves or outsource this type of advertising to marketing agencies for a fee. Content marketing, therefore, serves as a way for free advertising. It also provides the opportunity to reach a large audience with just one article or post in a short time, if we decide to pay for content publication, for example, on a nationwide internet portal — which is often problematic and requires significant effort with other forms of advertising.

What types of content and publication locations do we have to choose from?

In choosing content marketing, we have many forms and locations for publishing content at our disposal. Certainly, the basic form of content includes written pieces such as blog posts, thematic articles, expert texts, as well as statistics, reports, tutorials, or e-books and case studies. We can also utilize graphics and photos as well as multimedia materials like animations or interactive elements. More original forms of content include video recordings or podcasts. Various types of content can be published primarily on social media, on internet forums, paid on other websites, on our own blog or site, on YouTube, or anywhere potential audiences for our advertisements may be found.