What Is Content Marketing? Tips for Creating Effective Content

Most marketing activities today need an effective Content Marketing strategy to capture customers’ attention. And if you want to dig deeper into what Content Marketing is and the latest 2024 content trends, take a look at the information The7 provides below.

What Is Content?

Content is everything on a website (including text, images, videos, infographics…) that users can see. It sounds simple, but creating content that attracts and retains potential customers is always a “brain-straining” challenge for many content marketers.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is a form of Marketing in which a company, business or brand focuses on creating and distributing useful content related to its products/services.

The main purpose of a Content Marketing strategy is to attract and retain users so you can keep driving their behavior and convert them into customers. Content Marketing also helps readers fill gaps in their knowledge by sharing insights across many fields, such as education, health, beauty care, entertainment, perspectives, or multi-sided opinions on a specific issue or event.

Measuring the effectiveness of Content Marketing is essential for optimizing your strategy and improving ROI.

What Benefits Does Content Marketing Bring to Businesses?

Content Marketing is now used as a powerful “weapon” by many companies and businesses thanks to practical benefits like these:

Provides Diverse Information

This benefit is easy to see, right? When you build content for a website, it is certainly to share information about a particular field with users, such as healthcare, education, beauty, or electronic components…

And one of the effective ways for Google to read and understand your website is through content. This means that if you want to rank at the top of Google’s search results, you need to create and publish even more useful content.

Builds a Sustainable Brand for Your Business

Content Marketing plays an indispensable role throughout the brand-building process. It carries the information a company wants to plant in customers’ minds about the quality of its products/services and what sets it apart from competitors. This helps the company earn a solid place in the hearts of a wide customer base.

Boosts Sales of Products/Services

In today’s digital age, Content Marketing has become more and more important as a communication network that helps companies increase sales of their products/services. Billionaire Bill Gates once said “Content is King” to describe the value content brings to individuals and companies.

Content Marketing is, broadly, the practice of building suitable content based on research into customers’ behavior, needs and desires so you can deliver the highest-quality content. It also solves the practical problems customers are struggling with. More importantly, well-delivered content helps your products/services build trust with customers and strengthens the bond between your brand and its customers.

Increases Your Business’s Professionalism

One of the factors that boosts a business’s professionalism is the quality of the Content Marketing it delivers. When a business spends more time researching customers’ behavior, interests and problems, the content it delivers afterward is far more relevant.

In modern society, professionalism is indispensable if you want to attract customers. Businesses need to plan a specific strategy so that when customers need the products/services you offer, they will choose you first instead of another provider.

Saves Your Advertising Budget

Based on The7’s experience, the quality of Content Marketing is a key factor in making an advertising campaign effective. Good Content Marketing targets groups of users on digital platforms. So the better and deeper your content, the more easily it will hit customers’ psychology and make your campaign a success.

A professional Content Marketing strategy helps a business easily build a reputable brand with customers, create real long-term value, raise brand awareness, and gradually bring advertising costs down.

Strengthens Your Connection With Customers

Experience shows that Content Marketing is the “invisible” thread linking a company or business with its customers. One side supplies products/services, while the other chooses products/services from many other providers on the market.

So for customers to choose your business, every marketing campaign needs to focus on research and lay the groundwork for effective articles. The connection between a business and its customers starts by solving the customer’s problems and difficulties. It then builds their trust in your products/services. Remember that after-sales care is also very important, and you must never overlook it.

Increases Traffic

One undeniable benefit of content is that it increases the number of users who reach a business’s website through search engines. So if you want users to visit your website regularly, create content that touches their “pain points.”

Is Ordinary Content Different From Content Marketing?

Ordinary content is generally defined as multi-topic material found on most digital platforms today. It can be an article, video or post packed with information but without a strong purpose or value, so it ends up as junk or dilutes information.

So the question is: What is Content Marketing? Content Marketing is content that promotes information within the marketing strategies a company or business carries out to reach its desired goals.

Content Marketing helps a company capture customers’ interest, promote its products/services and build a brand foundation. Put simply, Content Marketing is the “key” that helps a business break down barriers with customers.

In short, what makes Content Marketing valuable above all is that it delivers diverse solutions and practical value to users. This is also the main point that helps you easily tell Content Marketing apart from ordinary content.

Where Does Content Marketing Stand in the Industry 4.0 Era?

The growth of Content Marketing in the “information explosion” era has made competition among businesses even fiercer. Most businesses have a team building content across various social platforms such as Facebook, websites, YouTube, TikTok…

So to stand out from competitors, the only way is to publish a lot of distinctive content and deliver even more practical value to customers. What you need to do now is produce content continuously to build the relationship between your business and customers through the content you deliver.

Despite being heavily shaped by technology in the Industry 4.0 era, Content Marketing still plays an important role for many companies and businesses and has become a must-have component of brand growth.

What Are the Types of Content Marketing?

Whatever Digital Marketing strategy you are running, Content Marketing is part of the process, not something separate from it. So which types of Content Marketing do marketers apply for their brands? Let’s dive deeper into each type with The7.

Blogs

A blog (or weblog) is a form of online journal on a website that covers one or more specific fields, with the writer expressing their personal views. Today, blog posts are one of the most important content strategies in Content Marketing. This type of content is quite popular in business and society because it lets users access quality information for free.

On the other hand, blog Content Marketing also brings practical benefits such as:

– Over 126% more leads for small companies and businesses

– Over 434% higher rate of pages submitted to Google for websites with a standard SEO process.

Once information is shared through your company’s blog, you will certainly become an expert in that field, and it will help you:

– Encourage existing customers to keep visiting the blog

– Nurture users/readers into potential customers

– Build ever more lasting trust with users who have never heard of the company/business.

Blogging is also considered a medium for other types of Content Marketing, including video, ebooks and infographics. Blog posts are usually shorter and cover the topics of a given field thoroughly, while these three formats (video, ebooks and infographics) present information in more detail and segment customer audiences. What the three formats have in common is that they are visual and capture users’ attention.

Ebook

An ebook (or electronic book) holds a lot of information shared about various aspects of an issue and is usually delivered as a PDF file. Ebooks are typically used to share guides and provide useful information that increases the number of email sign-ups for your company’s updates.

In addition, using ebooks in your Content Marketing strategy brings benefits such as:

– Compared with publications like books/magazines, ebooks save part of the printing, packaging and shipping costs, because you only need to build the content and pay the designer.

– Build credibility and increase brand awareness

– Generate revenue, for example by selling ebooks.

Video

In recent years, Video Marketing has been recognized as a highly effective form of Content Marketing within a content marketing strategy. Specifically:

– Higher conversion rate: According to HubSpot research, adding a video to a landing page can increase the conversion rate by up to 80%, far above an ordinary informational website. This shows that conveying emotion through compelling video is the most effective sales tool.

– Higher email open rate: Statistics show that embedding a video in an email increases the click rate by 200–300%.

– Optimized for SEO: In practice, search engines love video, so websites that embed video are up to 53 times more likely to appear on page 1 of Google.

Here is an example of video Content Marketing in the beauty industry. This is how The7 suggests you use video to deliver content:

• Record customer reviews after they use your beauty services.
• Share tips on choosing a reputable beauty salon
• Introduce the hottest beauty service you offer…
• Pretty varied, right?

There are currently 8 main types of Video Marketing that you can consider and apply, such as:

• Product videos: Videos produced to introduce the features and characteristics of a product/service, such as a short overview of a phone or a skincare service…
• Corporate videos: Share topics related to the people or members who make up the company/business.
• TV commercials: Videos that appear frequently on television.
• Animated videos: Videos that entertain while also explaining some aspect of a topic.
• Tutorial videos: Detailed instructions on how to do something, such as how to brew great coffee/cook, or how to use a massage device…
• Testimonial videos: Record customers’ reviews after they use a product/service.
• Website videos
• App videos
• Infographics

Infographics are also one of the effective types of Content Marketing that help companies convey information through visuals such as icons, figures or charts… Although quite popular in many countries around the world, in Vietnam not many businesses choose this form of Content Marketing for their marketing.

Email

Email Marketing is the practice of sending commercial messages to a group of people through their email addresses. Emails are sent in turn to potential customers or to customers who have already used the business’s products/services.

Compared with other forms of advertising, Email Marketing is the only one in which users actively ask to receive information from the company/business.

The benefits of email compared with other formats include:

• It doesn’t cost much
• It delivers your product/service message to target customers proactively
• It reaches a large number of users
• You can easily track and measure performance and conversion rate.

Social Media

Applying Social Marketing on social platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn… will bring you benefits such as:

– Growing your website and increasing traffic every day

– Raising brand awareness

– Increasing conversion rate and sales rate

– Making the most of “Word-of-Mouth” marketing.

And try to imagine what could happen if:

– Customers need and want to receive informational content from your marketing strategy.

– Customers receive information via print, email, websites, social media… when they have had enough time to digest that content.

– They start applying it and sharing it with their friends.

>> Wouldn’t that be great! So to build a successful Content Marketing strategy, you first have to follow your customers’ journey closely. This keeps the process of delivering value related to your products/services from getting “lost.”

Podcast

A podcast is an application that delivers information as digital audio or video for users to listen to directly. Podcasts are the best choice for your company’s communication campaign if your customers prefer listening to reading. As of now, podcasts are still not truly mainstream, but they are considered a platform worth testing for companies and businesses.

Template

Templates are a type of content that delivers high value to customers because they help them quickly solve the problems they face. This increases the connection between customers and the company/business, and in the future customers may continue to engage with more of the content you provide.

Templates are also a type of content that brings in plenty of quality data. With each download, you can invite users to leave their details to get the template free, and at the same time notify them when other quality content becomes available.

Other Popular Types of Content Marketing

Besides the common types of Content Marketing above, The7 will give you some other popular types of content. They include:

– Content guides: Similar to an ordinary blog post, but content guides have more distinctive visual design and effects. The main purpose of this type of content is to spur users to act.

– List content: Content that lists and compiles material related to a particular field/industry.

– How-to content: Following the AIDA model, how-to content is used to explain how to do something, and the writer raises a problem and then proposes a solution to drive user action.

– Meme content: It’s not hard to come across meme content on many social networks today, used to capture users’ attention. The writer follows existing trends and adds funny text or images so the post gets more engagement.

– Image content: Messages about a brand or a product/service are conveyed through images (known as image content). Eye-catching visuals combined with a memorable message will make your content attract more of users’ attention.

– Daily content: Similar to a newsletter that is updated regularly, on a weekly or monthly basis. Posting consistently builds a habit in readers, and they will never miss any news.

– User-generated content: This type of content is written entirely from each writer’s personal experience and impressions. It is often used to express the company/business’s point of view, so content writers need real expertise and skill in how they deliver it.

– Press releases: Content limited to one page of text and used to announce new events or activities of the company/business.

– Livestream: You interact directly with users on social media through livestreams. This makes the company/business’s image friendlier to users and increases brand awareness.

Building Content Marketing Around the Customer Journey

The way The7 shows you to build Content Marketing around the customer journey is quite simple. It includes: Awareness => Comparison and Evaluation => Decision => Purchase.

A customer’s journey consists of 3 stages: Awareness (TOFU), Evaluation (MOFU) and Purchase (BOFU). At each stage, a company/business needs to put the right promotional strategies in place to earn trust and connect with customers.

For Facebook Pages, building Content Marketing around the customer journey is easy to spot. It can appear as images, videos or infographics, depending on what the company/business wants to convey.

Below, The7 gives you a set of sample Content Marketing questions for each customer stage to help you build the most relevant content. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes so you can give more specific answers!

Questions for the Awareness Stage

• What problem or difficulty are you trying to find a solution for?
• How did you realize you have a particular problem or need?
• Do you have any goals or challenges right now?
• What information is truly useful to you?

Questions for the Evaluation and Comparison Stage

• How far have you researched your problems or difficulties?
• What criteria do you use to compare products/services?
• Is there currently a solution that stands out more to you? Why does it stand out?
• What kind of information or resources are useful to you?

Questions for the Decision Stage

• What made you take action?
• What are the most important decision criteria for you?
• What motivated you to take actions a, b, c…?
• Can you give a few examples of bad experiences you’ve had with a brand?
• Did any friends or family members take part in your final decision?

Once you have found answers to the questions above, the next step is to adjust the customer experience to match the right type of content. Finally, use the right channels and design a content map that follows the customer journey.

You can also check out these related articles:

• Types of content marketing
• Writing content marketing
• Content marketing plan template

Content Map: An Effective Content Marketing Method

A customer journey map is a framework for organizing your company/business’s Content Marketing strategies so they line up with customers’ goals and needs.

Of course, you can also use the map to uncover more opportunities to solve customers’ difficulties and needs by providing practical content and brand experiences.

Step 1: Create Personas

Use what you’ve learned from your research and interviews to develop customer profiles. Remember, the more detail, the better. Personas are profiles of the target audience you are aiming at, and they help shape your marketing strategies and tactics more deeply. They let you create content that meets customers’ needs, opinions and expectations.

At first, you design basic customer profiles and test your Content Marketing content/strategy. Over time, keep evaluating and adjusting your personas to further improve the content and messages you deliver to customers.

Step 2: Pinpoint Your Goals, Communication Channels and Touchpoints

In reality, there are many channels through which customers interact with and experience a product/service or brand, including email, Facebook, websites, stores, phone calls…

Some people like connecting with a company/business on Facebook, while others aren’t interested. So the question is: how can your company/business support customers through the 3 stages of Awareness, Comparison and Purchase based on how they interact?

What you need to do then is find out whether your communication channels are effective. Are your product/service messages and offers reaching customers in the best way? Does your staff take good care of customers?… Then look at where the weaknesses are and improve them.

Step 3: Develop Diverse Content

In reality, marketing is always changing, and this is how customers make their final purchase decisions. When customers choose online platforms to look for solutions to their problems, you need to make sure you provide high-value content that supports their online research. Mapping the customer journey and addressing customers’ needs also helps you better understand the “customer-centric” approach and identify the content you need to develop.

Step 4: Measure and Evaluate

A detailed measurement plan for each specific campaign helps you determine what adjustments are needed. Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking and measuring website traffic, Facebook Insights and Facebook marketing campaigns. Naturally, once you have the data, you can easily make smart decisions about your marketing plan and Content Marketing strategy.

Popular Content Distribution Channels Today

Above, The7 has given you the answer to what Content Marketing is. Next, here are the most popular content distribution channels today.

SEO-Optimized Blogs

Once optimized for SEO, blogs become a “gold mine” that brings your company/business closer to millions of users every day. Content published on a blog can be useful knowledge-sharing posts or product/service introductions.

What’s special here is that it hits customers’ psychology, raises order conversion value and increases the number of potential customers. Above all, this platform provides customers with plenty of information proactively, so they can reach and absorb it more easily than on many other social platforms.

Social Media Pages

Social media is an indispensable platform that contributes to the success of a company/business’s communication campaigns. Facebook is proof: it connects millions of users across different fields and age groups. There are also other social networks, such as YouTube, TikTok and Instagram…, that let companies/businesses easily reach a wide range of users.

Email Marketing

Although it is a traditional form of Content Marketing, Email Marketing still plays an important role today. It is a powerful tool that helps many companies/businesses save costs while achieving extremely high results in certain fields. For small and medium-sized businesses, using Email Marketing in a communication campaign increases effectiveness at an extremely low cost. Most of all, Email Marketing targets potential customers in the most proactive way.

Other Distribution Channels

Besides the Content Marketing distribution channels above, businesses can increase brand coverage and sales through other formats such as affiliate marketing, KOLs, sponsored content or guest posting.

How to Build a Low-Cost Content Marketing Strategy

To build a Content Marketing strategy on a “modest” budget, you first need to do high-quality content research and analysis. Instead of pouring your budget into traditional marketing, your business can take advantage of multi-channel advertising.

Next, your Content Marketing should lean toward viral, trend-following content so users find it fun and spread it to the people around them on their own, without you pouring budget into ad campaigns.

Tips for Finding Content Ideas

Here are some tips for finding content ideas that you can consider and apply to your company/business’s Content Marketing strategy.

Focus on What’s Popular

Are you running Content Marketing campaigns? Use your measurement results to pick out which content draws the most views. Tools that can help include Google Analytics, Ahrefs Content Explorer, BuzzSumo… Then go deeper into similar content or improve your existing content so you can get closer to your target customers and potential customers.

Run Surveys and Study the Answers Carefully

We all know the simplest way to learn what someone needs is to ask them. If you already have an email list of potential customers, send them an online survey by email.

If you don’t have a customer email list, give them valuable information for free in exchange for their email address, then run the survey. Or invite them directly to take part in a survey for a reward…

There are many ways to run a survey, but what matters is that your end goal is to find out what your audience cares about.

Distribute Your Content

When your content is truly good, it creates a viral effect, and you surely look forward to that, right! But before you become a top content writer with a large following, your competitors will already have distributed their content and pointed thousands of backlinks everywhere. Of course, the higher your reach, the more engagement you get, and the more potential customers find out about your content and start to love it.

This reality shows you can’t rely on quality content alone. Combine it with the ability to distribute your content to get closer to your customers.

However, remember that to deliver the best results for your company/business, you need to run multi-channel efforts, not just Content Marketing. The7’s all-in-one Marketing service is a solution that helps you get an overall strategy and reach your revenue goals sooner. Check it out now!

>>> See more: 5 WAYS TO CREATE VIRAL CLIPS THAT GET “MILLIONS OF VIEWS” ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Catch Up on the 45 Latest Content Marketing Trends for 2024

The last thing The7 wants to share with you is the 45 Hot Content Trends of 2024 (researched by HubSpot). We hope they help you.

Visual Content Marketing (Images/Videos)

– About 32% of marketers say visual images are the form of Content Marketing that plays the most important role for companies/businesses, while blogs account for only about 27% (in second place)

– 80% of marketers choose to use visual images in their social media marketing campaigns. Video accounts for 63% of social media marketing choices, while blogs “fall behind” at 60%.

– When people hear a piece of new information, they usually remember only 10% of it after 3 days. But if you add a relevant image, retention rises to 65% after 3 days.

– The number of B2C marketers who say visual content is most important today is 11% higher than among B2B marketers.

– About 51% of B2B marketers prioritize visual content in their marketing campaigns.

– Mobile video views have reached about 10 million per minute per day over the past 2 years.

Video Marketing

– Cisco predicted that by 2021, global Internet traffic would account for about 82% of users’ traffic.

– More than 70% of viewers watch videos on YouTube to solve problems related to learning, hobbies, research and work.

– 43% of B2C marketers predict that video production will be the type of content that delivers the most successful marketing.

– YouTube has truly become the top source of video content for users at 83%, while Facebook accounts for only 67% (in second place).

– Video streaming has trended up significantly in recent years. On the Twitch livestreaming platform, there were on average more than 13 million hours of live streaming per day (2012–2017).

– 62% of B2B marketers consider video an effective Content Marketing strategy.

– Using the word “video” in email subject lines increases the email open rate by 19% and the click rate by about 65%

– According to a 2018 survey, about 54% of users want to watch videos from the brands or companies/businesses they love.

– In 2016, about 14% of marketers chose to use live video (livestreaming), but by 2018 that figure had risen to 35%.

– Facebook users spend far more time watching live video (3 times as much) than traditional video. Other statistics also show that Facebook live video has an engagement rate of about 4.3%, versus only about 2.2% for non-live video.

– 90% of video plays on Twitter happen on mobile devices (up 203% from 2015).

– Videos under 5 minutes long account for 55% of total smartphone viewing time.

– Magnify’s research found that 29% more people watch 360-degree video than watch the same content in a traditional format.

– 85% of adults watch content on many different devices at the same time.

VR (Virtual Reality) Technology

– According to Lowe’s analysis, tutorial videos displayed in VR have a 36% higher viewing rate than ordinary YouTube videos.

– A 2018 statistic shows 82% of respondents want more immersive experiences on their phones.

– Gaming, education and healthcare are expected to receive the most investment in VR technology

Infographics

– Internet readers are often drawn to images that carry information (infographics). In practice, when an image relates to the content of an article, readers spend most of their time on the image rather than reading the article.

– We are said to absorb information and images 323% better than information in text alone.

– Infographics can increase website traffic by up to 12%

– B2B marketers have used infographics heavily over the past 4 years, currently at 65%

Social Media

– Tweets with images receive about 150 messages compared with tweets without images.

– Based on an analysis of about 1 million articles, articles that include an image every 75–100 words get more shares than articles without images.

– Facebook posts with images get 2.3 times more engagement than posts without images.

– The viewing time of Periscope live video adds up to approximately 110 years.

– More than 500 million people use Instagram every day.

– 67% of marketers see Facebook as the most important media platform for them

– 85% of videos posted on Facebook are watched without sound.

– More than 500 million Facebook users watch videos on the platform every day.

– Snapchat users watch about 10 billion videos per day

– Snapchat users share 9,000 photos per second

– 52% of marketers report that they have seen signs of declining organic reach on Facebook over the past year.

– 92% of videos published on Facebook are native Facebook videos.

– Snapchat has about 187 million daily active users (as of 2018)

– B2C marketers are 8% more likely than B2B marketers to see Pinterest as a visual content platform.

– Shopify users referred by Pinterest spend an average of $80, compared with only $40 for Facebook users

– More than 80% of pins are repinned, while only 1.4% of tweets are retweeted.

– YouTube reaches users aged 18+ during peak hours better than any other social platform.

– More than half of YouTube subscribers (ages 18–34) would drop everything they’re doing to watch a new video from a channel they love.

Frequently Asked Questions About Content Marketing

The next thing The7 wants to share with you is the questions people most often ask when building a Content Marketing strategy.

Should You Outsource Content Marketing or Hire a Full-Time Employee?

Content Marketing writing services are very common today and offer excellent quality, so if you haven’t found a content employee you’re happy with, you can still hire an outside content service. However, The7 would like to remind you to choose a reputable provider.

How Long Does It Take to Create Content for One Post?

It depends on the type of content and the ability of the person doing it, so completion times vary. Typically, writing a blog post of about 4,000–5,000 words takes one day to finish.

Which Type of Content Marketing Is Most Effective?

This question is hard to answer because each type of content has a different role and value. But based on current user trends, we can easily see that video is the type of content most people love and the most effective, thanks to its ability to deliver information quickly.

If you focus on building content with video, you will attract many people to the products/services and brand of your company/business.

Does Content Marketing Generate Profit?

The answer is definitely YES. Content Marketing builds the audience you are targeting through many different kinds of content. Quality content helps a company/business gain more potential customers.

Conclusion

The7 believes that after reading this article, you now know the answer to What is Content Marketing? and have picked up the 45 latest content trends for 2024, so you can start building more professional Content Marketing strategies. If you need support from a team of professional Content Marketing experts, or help with other issues related to all-in-one Marketing, contact The7.

For all information about our services, contact us today by Hotline: 082 246 7979 – 028 3899 7377 or visit https://the7digital.com/ for a consultation!

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