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What is content marketing and why do you need it?

Speak! Agency • Jan 03, 2020
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Content marketing (aka inbound marketing) is all about attracting people to your brand. Whereas the goal of traditional out-bound marketing efforts (like paid advertising and mass email blasts) is to go out and find buyers, inbound marketing activities make it easy for buyers to find your brand on their own.

The thinking behind the inbound approach is that in today’s mile-a-minute, over-messaged world, people don’t have the time for or interest in your marketing. They want your help. They want to be educated. They may even want to be entertained.

This blog post is a prime example of inbound marketing. We wrote it and published it on our website so we would get found by marketers, like you. We shared it on our social media channels to attract new visitors to our website and build a community of followers.

Why? The idea is that by educating you on a topic we know a lot about, you’ll remember us and trust us when it comes time to develop an inbound marketing strategy for your own brand. You might even download additional information like, ahem, our inbound marketing punchlist. Thereby furthering your relationship with us.

So if inbound marketing is a strategy designed to attract potential buyers to your brand, what’s content marketing? Are they the same thing? You’ll hear people using them interchangeably, which is fine. They are certainly related to one another and we’re not ones to nitpick. However, if it helps, you can think of inbound as the stick (the strategy) and content as the carrot (the tactic).

The key here is there are many different types of content for many different situations. In addition to a carrot, you might also need celery, lettuce or even cauliflower to attract the most bunnies. Likewise, in addition to a blog post, you might also develop ebooks, infographics, explainer videos, webinars and case studies to reach a wider audience with different content consumption preferences.

Inbound marketing is a proven methodology for attracting prospects to your brand and turning them into customers. According to a 2020 study by Hubspot, content marketing delivers 60% of marketers stated Content Marketing is ‘very important’ or ‘extremely important’ to their overall strategy.

If your marketing department is under pressure to deliver more quality leads to sales, inbound marketing is probably part of the answer. But before you fire up the content creation engine, we’ll leave you with one final point to consider. Your competition is going to be doing the same thing. So are thousands of other companies across the business landscape. In fact, 70% of marketers are actively investing in content creation.

To get noticed and earn the trust of buyers, you don’t just need content. You need to research, write, design and publish quality content. Plus you’ll need a complete inbound marketing strategy for distributing and sharing it. These are the areas where Speak! can help. Contact us today and let’s chat about how to improve your inbound marketing efforts.

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