Why Content Marketing?

Video Transcript

In this lesson let's learn how content marketing can help your business! Content marketing is a practice that's spreading far and wide throughout the web marketing world. It's getting a lot of traction and there are reasons why. Let me explain through an example.

Example

Let's say we've got ABCRealEstate.com. ABC Real Estate has got content that's exclusively built right on their website. This site has a homepage, contact page, an about page and they some of the their listings. Let's just say ABC is designed exclusively for potential customers to find them and for their current customers to browse property. They're attracting these two groups. The goal of the site is to show off the business.

Next we have have ElijahsHouseHunters.com. Elijah has got a blog, neighborhood maps, a stats page showing what's going on in the Seattle market, prices trends, and what the medians used to be and are expected to be in the near future. Elijah has some tips for house sellers and house buyers. There is also a bunch of information about contacting them and other recommended providers.

Content Spreads

Elijah's content is really designed to help anyone with an interest in the Seattle real estate market. It's not just for current customers, it's also helpful for press and bloggers, other real estate professionals. If the site is crafted correctly these industry influencers going to say, "Hey, you should go check out Elijah's House Hunters site. He's actually got a ton of great information about the Seattle market. That's the place to go." Your content helps your business spread. A much larger group of potential customers will be exposed to this site, not just directly, but through these other channels.

This is the goal of content marketing. It's to make your website a hub, a destination beyond just the direct value that your business provides, so that you can earn referrals, word of mouth, traffic from search engines, from social media sites, from all the ways that links can be seen and shared on the web through inbound channels.

Brand Impression

We're trying to create a relationship and a brand impression prior to a direct engagement. When someone comes to a website, they get a real sense for who you are and what you do. Most importantly, they learn how you can help them. This happens all the time to us at Moz. We have a popular blog and a great Q&A forum and lots of interesting content about ranking factors, algorithm histories, and we get a ton of people who say, "You should check out Moz for marketing software," even if they've never used us. They're familiar with us through our content.

Moz also tries to drive some secondary signals. These are things like links, social shares, mentions, etc. They're going to help us to rank higher in search engines, because they're all things search engines want to measure.

A smart thing to do is focus your content in a place that you're uniquely qualified to create or where you believe you can build outstanding value.

Also, content should appeal to your audience and to their influencers in a way that makes those people want to do business with you. Make them want to connect with you even if they have no reason to. You want to create the kind of content where someone comes and says, "Elijah's House Hunters, that's just a great website. If I ever need something, and I might not for another five or ten years, but if I ever do, I want to go there. I'm going to tell my cousin and my friends and my coworkers that they should check him out too."

Lastly, you want something that's likely to be promoted through channels where your audience participates. This might mean thinking about the type of content you're creating, the style, the focus, thinking about what you're actually going to put in there, and what network to share it all on.