Okay, if you work in business, marketing, or more specifically SEO you may have heard about what content is or what is content marketing?
You have at least been exposed to it through the following forms:
- Blogs
- Podcast
- Video
- SEO
- Email Marketing
- Newspapers
- Copywriting
- Social Media
- Landing Pages
But exactly …
What is content?
Content is the entire content on the website (including videos, images, text, infographic, …) that users can see.
Surely you cannot forget a famous saying “Content is King” – Bill Gates? It is extremely accurate in content marketing today. To create an attractive content, retaining potential customers is always a hard problem for every content marketer.
Yes, the content translated means the content. But is it merely the text / sentence in an ordinary article as people think it is.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the marketing activities of a business or brand which focus on creating & distributing valuable content related to products / services.
With the purpose of attracting and retaining users from which to promote behavior and convert them into customers, content marketing helps readers improve their knowledge about life by sharing information about areas in life such as:
- Education
- Entertainment
- A multi-dimensional perspective / comment on a problem / thing,…
Instead of promoting your product or service, you provide content that is really useful to potential customers, thereby helping them to solve the problems that they are having.
Now you understand what content is and what content marketing is.
There are 10 truths about marketing that not everyone knows, are you curious? Let’s discover it now!
What is the importance of content?
Provide information
This is obvious, right? You create content for a website that is definitely for some purpose of sharing information with users.
That may include knowledge of health, computer components, sports equipment, etc.
And one of the quickest ways for Google to understand your website is through content. Google always wants to provide useful content to its users.
If you want to rank high on google search results, you have to post more useful content like that.
Increase traffic
One of the benefits of good content is to increase the number of users who find your website through search engines.
Search engines love content, especially content that is regularly updated. And if you want users to access your website, create content that touches the “pain” of the user.
Let’s try to think:
How many pages accurately describe your product / service on your website?
Compared to blogs, very few, right?
And there are several pages that provide information on new courses. However, it is nothing compared to the number of blogs posted.
No one wants to hear someone talk and talk about their products and services without sharing any useful information.
Most search engines focus on optimizing the user experience. This means that your website must provide relevant information to attract their eyes.
Investing in making and optimizing the quality of SEO content is important to your SEO website success.
What is the difference between normal content and content marketing?
Read the definition of content marketing again, but this time remove the “value and relevance” section. That’s the difference between content marketing and the spam that many companies are trying to “sell” to you.
Companies send information via email, share on social networks,… all the time – most of it is irrelevant or has no value (you can call it spam / spam).
That is the usual content.
What makes content marketing valuable in today’s environment is the element: Content provides solutions / values that are useful to users.
This is a prerequisite thing to distinguish between content marketing and other common content.
Types of content marketing
Regardless of which Digital Marketing strategy you are applying, content marketing must be part of your process rather than something separate.
Because quality content is simply part of all forms of marketing.
> You may be interested in: A very simple 4-step process of creating a standard SEO article that pulls thousands of traffic to the website.
And 6 main forms of content marketing that are widely applied by marketers for their brands include:
- Blogs
- E-book
- Videos
- Infographic
- Email marketing
- Blogs
What is a blog?
A blog (weblog) is a form of diary on the website referring to one or several specific areas, which the writer (or organization) expresses based on personal viewpoint.
Blog posts are a leading strategy in content marketing!
Blogs are popular in the business & social world because they allow people to access quality information for free.
Besides, blog content marketing brings the following benefits:
- Increasing 126% of leads brought to small businesses
- Increasing 434% of the rate covered by Google Index pages (for SEO – Search engine optimization)
When information content is shared through a business blog, you are sure to become an expert in that area, which will:
- Encourage repeat customers to continue visiting the blog
- Nurture users / readers to become potential customers
- Build trust with users who have never heard of the business
Writing blogs is also a means of communication for other types of content marketing such as eBooks, videos and infographic.
While blog posts are often shorter and thoroughly address the topics in the field, these 3 forms provide more detailed information on customer information and classification.
The common characteristics of all three forms are: visualization and user attraction.
- Ebook
Ebooks contain large amounts of information that is shared on many aspects of a problem, often repackaged into a PDF file.
Using ebooks to share instructions, provide useful information helps increase the number of email subscriptions for newsletters from you.
Why is that?
Because that’s when readers are interested in the ebook content you provide and leave an email on your registration page and receive this ebook.
>> Ebook Template sharing 3 Breakthrough Secrets SEO Strategy for Business
In addition, using ebooks in content marketing strategy also brings benefits:
- Save on printing, packaging and shipping costs compared to publications like books and magazines (you only need to create content and budget for design ebooks)
- Create credibility, brand identity
- Generating a revenue stream (for example, selling an ebook)
- Video
In recent years, video marketing has been considered the most effective form of content marketing strategy, specifically:
- Increase conversion rates:
According to Hubspot, adding video on your landing page can boost conversion rates by up to 80%, far beyond reading a regular page.
Properly conveying emotions through compelling videos is the most powerful selling tool!
- Increase email open rate:
Statistics show that inserting a video in an email helps to increase the clickthrough rate by 200 – 300%
Inserting the “video” in the mail header will help increase the rate of opening mail & reducing the rate of unsubscribing newsletters.
- SEO optimization:
The truth is…
Search engine loves video!
Websites that attached videos will have 53 times more visibility on the front page of Google!
Assuming I do tours as business, here are ways I use videos to convey content like:
- Back to review / testimonial of visitors who have toured the company
- Sharing experiences of backpacking / trekking in Ta Nang, Phan Dung
- Introducing beautiful scenes of Sapa
- Quotations, tour costs abroad, …
It’s very diverse, right?
8 types of video marketing:
In general, video marketing and viral video marketing are divided into 8 main categories:
- Product video: Introduction about the features and characteristics of the product (Ex: Video introduction to a refrigerator, phone, …)
- Business video: Share about the people and members that make up the organization and business.
- Television advertising: Video appears continuously on television
- App Videos
- Animated videos: Entertaining, while explaining a certain aspect
- Website video
- Video tutorial: Detailed instructions on doing any one thing (Ex: Video tutorial on cooking a dish, …)
- Video Testimonial – Record customer reviews when using the service
4. Infographic:
Infographic is an effective way to convey all information through an image with charts, illustrations, figures,…
Although infographic is very popular in the world, but in Vietnam not many businesses / websites choose this form of content marketing for marketing.
Email marketing is the sending of business mail to a group of people via their email address.
Accordingly, each email is sent to potential customers or purchased business.
In all forms of advertising, email marketing is the only form that users actively request to receive from the website / business.
Some advantages of using email over other forms include:
- Does not require too much expense, specialized set up team.
- Drive service / product messages to target customers proactively.
- Access to a large number of users.
- Measure efficiency, conversion rate easily.
>> How to know if your Email Marketing is effective? The ROI ratio will help you. By the way, do you know what ROI is?
- Social media
Using Social Media Marketing on social media channels like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. will help you:
- Develope website and increase traffic (website traffic)
- Improve brand awareness
- Increase the ability to convert and sell
- Make the most out of word-of-mouth marketing – Word of mouth
And what if:
- Customers expect to receive content from your marketing strategy
- Did they receive it, via print, email, website, social networks while spending 15, 30, 45 minutes poring over that content?
- Do they apply and share it with their friends?
It is extremely amazing, isn’t it!
The truth is like technology, content marketing changes extremely fast. To create a successful content marketing strategy, you need to understand the current trends.
Below are 39 content marketing trends which are studied by Hubspot:
39 content marketing trends you should know in 2019
What is Buzzsumo?
BuzzSumo is a tool that allows users to find the information that is most interested in, serving for journalistic purposes, building content strategies, blogging or other purposes.
1) 37% of marketers say visual images are the form of content that plays the most important role in their business.
2) 80% of marketers use images in their social media marketing campaign, more than blogs (68%) and videos (60%).
3) When hearing a new piece of information, you only remember 10% of it after 3 days. However, if you add a related image, you will retain up to 65% of this information after 3 days.
4) B2C marketers place greater importance on visual content (visual content) than B2B marketers.
5) 51% of B2B marketers prioritize choosing visual images in their marketing campaigns in 2016.
Video Marketing
6) In 2017, video content accounted for 74% of internet traffic.
7) Cisco predicts that global Internet traffic coming from video will account for 82% of user traffic by 2021.
8) 76.5% of marketers and small business owners in an Animoto survey that used video marketing said it had a strong direct impact on their business.
9) 34% of B2C marketers say video production will be the deciding factor for content marketing success in 2017.
10) The number of users who prefer watching videos rather than reading the content about a product has increased by 4 times.
11) More than 60% of marketers and small business owners say that they plan to increase their investment in video marketing by 2018.
12) 62% of B2B marketers rated videos as an effective content marketing tactic by 2016.
13) Using the word “video” in an email subject line increases the opening rate to 19% and the clickthrough rate to 65%.
14) In the 2016 HubSpot survey, 43% of consumers wanted to watch more video content in 2016.
Visual content marketing trends (including images / videos)
15) In 2016, 14% of marketers used live stream video.
16) Facebook users spend 3 times more time watching online movies (live stream videos) than traditional videos.
17) 51% of all video “play” presses are done on mobile devices – this increase is 15% compared to 2015 and 203% increase compared to 2014.
18) Videos with less than 5 minutes in length make up 55% of the total time watching videos on Smartphones.
19) Magnifyre found that more people that account for 29% viewed 360-degree videos compared to a video in a traditional format with the same content.
20) 85% of adults consume content on multiple devices at the same time.
Infographic
21) Eye tracking research shows that internet readers pay attention to images that carry information. In fact, when images are relevant, readers spend more time viewing images than reading text on the page.
22) Infographics are “liked” and shared on social media 3 times more time compared to other content types.
23) Infographics are the B2B content marketing strategy with the largest increase in usage, from 2015 to 2016, up from 50% to 58%.
24) People who receive information including text and illustrations are 323% better than those who only get information from text.
Social Network
25) After analyzing more than 1 million articles, BuzzSumo found that posts that insert images into every 75-100 words receive twice as much social media sharing than articles with few images.
26) Facebook posts with images will be 2.3 times more interactive than no images.
27) There were more than 500 million Instagram users in June 2016.
28) 55% of marketers choose Facebook as their most important social media platform.
29) 85% of videos on Facebook are watched without sound.
30) Facebook users watch 8 billion videos a day.
31) Snapchat users watch 10 billion videos a day.
32) Snapchat users share 9,000 photos per second.
33) The number of Facebook’s natural interactions doubled in 2015, while Instagram almost halved.
34) The highest level of Facebook engagement for posts with videos are (13.9%) and photos (13.7%).
35) Snapchat has 150 million daily active users in June 2016.
36) 44% of women use Pinterest online, compared to 16% of men.
37) Shoppers introduced by Pinterest spend an average of $80 compared to Facebook referrals of $40.
38) YouTube reaches more people who are above 18 years old in peak hours than any other social network or TV
39) Half of YouTube subscribers is between the age from 18 years old to 34 years old will dismiss everything that they are doing to watch a new video from their favorite channel.
Conclusion
Hopefully, through this article, you will understand what content marketing is, capture current content marketing trends as well as create better strategies. Please share this article if you like.