Content Marketing Explained

21^st Century marketing is an ever-changing process and most marketing consultants agree that your company needs to act fast if it’s going to keep up with the times.

Online marketing now represents a considerable percentage of many businesses’ advertising revenues, but with the nature of web use and the changeability of search engines like Google keeping everyone on their toes, how do you know that your company is getting the online exposure it deserves?

Take content marketing for example. Ten years ago, if a company wanted to improve its ranking on Google or other search engines, it would simply cram its web page and white papers with search-friendly keywords – the more, the better.

That way, businesses could simply buy their way up the food chain and appear in the first five search results without ever having done anything to warrant such exposure. Very recently however, Google received a software update that made its searches far more intelligent.

No longer is mindless repetition of keywords the only desirable factor. Now, websites are ranked based on how frequently they’re visited, how often they update their webpages and how much engagement they receive from visitors to their site. This is where content marketing comes in.

Content marketing works on the premise that websites are rewarded for having engaging, sharable and readable content on their homepages and blog rolls.

Anything loosely related to the nature of your business will work, but the best examples of content marketing are those that explore new ideas, are exciting or funny and encourage web users to click, read, share and remember. That way, not only does your site’s search engine profile begin to rise, but more and more traffic will be driven to your company’s webpage and more people will be likely to remember and search for your services in future.

Content marketing sounds simple and in theory it is – in practice though, creating numerous pieces of well-written, engaging content, editing them, posting them to your site and then promoting them on social media takes far more skill and effort than most companies can comfortably handle in-house.