The Art of Content Marketing
You’ve probably heard that “content is king”. Content is insights! Expressed in myriad forms and styles, it is information that makes readers feel, think and change their lives. Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Gary Vee, and many others have long been singing the praises of the almighty content for years. Content marketing is an art of initiating communication with prospects without actually selling them any product, but introducing or reminding consumers about your brand. So you can see, content marketing strategy stands in the “awareness” stage of the sales funnel.
There’re so many exciting statistics about content marketing like content marketing campaigns cost less than 62% less than traditional marketing, but generates 3x as many leads. According to CMI, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers and 60% of B2C marketers are committed to content marketing. Feeling excited already? Then keep reading to see more benefits.
There’s no better long-term strategy than content marketing. Unlike social media ads or press releases, content can drive traffic, awareness or leads for years. Content that is designed to bring the audience to us can be in various different formats like written articles, infographics, video tutorials, social media posts and many more. Regardless of type, quality content should answer a specific question or solution for a problem that your potential customers might be searching for.
Long story short, when done right content marketing is the best strategy to grow your brand’s awareness and engagement.
The content marketing strategy consists of two main steps:
- Producing engaging content that readers would want to read.
- Distributing that content so that it can be found on organic search.
Both of these steps are important to run successful content marketing, but you don’t have to do everything manually. The science of automation, like in any part of our life, helps us save time which as you know is also money. Today I’m going to blend the art content marketing with the science of automation for you.
Ways to Automate Content Marketing
You can still automate some part of work at different stages in the content marketing pipeline: Content creation, curation, and distribution.
Create
Despite advanced big data technologies and AI, automation of the content creation process is still in its infancy but we can still automate some parts of the process – visual, audio and text can be created automatically by AI algorithms.
There’re companies that offer NLG services that can solve problems like creating reports from given data or preparing text research. Automated Insights Wordsmith is a SaaS platform that turns the document into text. Narrative Science’s Quill provides similar content generation but as a managed service.
Google’s Deepmind can generate meaningful images from your sentences. Google’s other tool, Duplex is an AI system reads texts verbally, even adds human-like pauses and fillers to its speech.
Curate
Content curation is easier than content creation. It’s a time-saving tactic that enables the use of quality content from other creators to sustain your audience’s attention. It’s a place where automated tools really shine. The concept is basically about finding the perfect content and indicating it to your audience on social media in a way that adds value.
First thing you need to know that this content doesn’t have to be yours, actually it has to belong to someone else you praise. The range goes from the prominent expert advice from a relevant thought leader, to an exceptional blog post from a website you are interested in. All you have to do is to select only the best content that deserves to be seen by your social media followers, and then voilà, you fulfilled your role as a content creator.
Distribute
Content distribution channels can be categorized into three groups : Owned media , Earned media and Paid media
Owned Distribution
Owned media is something that no third party has a control over. You are the one and only ruler of the content you are going to promote. Your website, blog, videos, social media posts, etc. can include owned media examples.
Earned Distribution
Earned media is a bit different than owned media. Here you need third parties to involve the sharing process of content for you. These people can be social media influencers or other social media users who repost or retweet content constantly. Product reviews, social media mentions, tweets, shares, reposts, non-sponsored blog posts etc. can be the exact case for earned media.
Paid Distribution
If we look into the content distribution statistics, phonemonel results will make your jaws drop, I promise.
- Google answers 3.8 million search queries per minute.
- 952 posts are published on Instagram each second.
- 8,726 tweets are posted to Twitter each second.
- 60% of marketers create one piece of content each day.
I think now you have enough reason to believe that with all the opportunities presented to you in a golden plate, you can spread your brand’s value wider than you imagined. There is no room for mere excuses for letting your holdings fade away. Distribute your content and enjoy the process.