What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing can go by a lot of different names such as private media, branded content, customer media and so on, but they are all essentially content marketing. This is probably one of the best ways to make sure your marketing is being truly effective.

One definition of content marketing is: a technique of making and distributing valuable and relevant content to bring in a much defined target audience with the over all objective being the creation of sales. Basically this is a way to reaching out to your customers and potential customers in a way specifically designed to attract them to you and keep them coming back.

Content marketing is all done without overtly trying to sell a product; it is intended to educate and inform the customers. With typical marketing, the goal is to make a sale and the product or service is the main point of the approach. Content marketing is very different from this approach and has proven to be very effective.

The idea around content marketing is to deliver consistent and useful information to the customer. In return, they will reward the company with their business and, over time, their loyalty to the brand. This form of marketing creates a bond between the customer and the company. This bond is a very hard one to break and results in ongoingbusiness over time and a loyal customer.

Traditional marketing is becoming less and less useful as customers are able to skip commercials or change the channel on the TV. Ads in papers and billboards are not interactive and provide no real help to the customer. Pop-ups on the Internet are another way advertisers try to market their products but this can be ineffective as more and more people use their pop-up blocking tools on their browsers to avoid these invasive marketing tactics.

Content marketing breaks the mold completely and as odd as it may seem, the customer is the one who searches out the information they need. Not only do they remember where they found what they needed, they remember who provided the useful information as well -and this is where the marketing comes in.

Potential customers will buy from a company they trust and feel has the same interests as they do. This is why providing helpful advice and information is so very important to this marketing strategy. Most of the time, the people reading information on a web page don’t realize they are being marketed to as they read the content.

Recent studies have shown 70-80% of people who were surveyed, felt more comfortable buying something from a company they trust. Content marketing builds trust, because the customer begins to look forward to your next content installment and may make decisions based on the information given.

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Content Marketing: How to Generate Leads

Content Marketing is a type of marketing used to increase sales by creating and delivering high-quality information to potential customers as well as current ones. Content marketing goes hand in hand with another type of marketing called network marketing (or social networking) because more people can be reached by using both together.

With the use of network marketing, you are able to reach out to more people and create more leads. This can also generate more sales over time. By combining the two types of marketing, you are able to reach more people with your valuable and informative content. This will create more interest in your products or services thus increasing sales.

You can generate ongoing leads using both content and network marketing. You can create your content in almost any form imaginable, using articles, videos, audio, e-books and teleseminars. All of these forms of content can be spread across a massive social networking base using websites such as MySpace, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here are some important things to remember when beginning this form of marketing:

Set yourself up as an expert in your industry. When people feel more comfortable coming to you for information they are more likely to listen to your suggestions. They will see you as someone who is giving them loads of useful information and content they can use to solve problems, save time and make money. Over time, they will begin to follow you and want to know more about you and your business, which will lead into sales down the line.

Your prospects or customer base will begin to share what you have taught them. This is called viral marketing. The basic premise involves people becoming so impressed with the information you have shared with them, they then share it with other people. This process goes on repeatedly. In fact, through the Internet, it can go on for years. This is, without a doubt, the best part of content marketing since the information is being shared with no further interaction from you.

It is very important the content you are sharing is valuable and informative. If you are providing people with useless information, no positioning in the world will matter because they won’t feel as if they are being helped in any way.

Generating leads with content marketing is not hard to do. The process just takes a little practice to find the right places to place your content for your target market and the right type of information to share. Once you have some ideas and information, get involved on social networking sites. Join like-minded groups and start contributing tips and tidbits to the group. Don’t go in for the immediate sale or use spam as a selling tactic or this will immediately turn people off.

Start slowly and offer short nuggets of highly informative content and then offer a link to read more. Once people go to your collection of articles, video or audio collections you can really let loose and bring them to you and your products.

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