Content Marketing

Have you ever seen a photo on social media that was so funny, so sad or just provokes an emotion that you have to share it, like it or engage with it in some type of way. Well this is a form of content marketing. Content marketing is designed to capture the interest of the people it’s placed in front of.

Content Marketing Vs Regular Advertising

What makes content marketing different than just plain old advertising? Let’s use Facebook as an example, if we were selling cat toys a regular post from us might be something like “Hey check out this brand new cat toy by Kat Toys R Us, it’s the hottest new toy out get yours while supplies last” and we’ll post that with a picture of the toy, or maybe a picture of a cat playing with a toy.

While this is okay if you already have an engaged audience on page, this won’t go very far if you do not, in fact it probably won’t go very far even if you have an engaged audience because most people are not scrolling through their Facebook timeline looking for things to buy, instead their scrolling looking for things to be entertained by.

So the goal with content marketing is to bring in that “wow factor” and give them something that will provoke an emotion. If I’m looking to sell a cat toy I first need to realize that the cat owners do not care about the toy, but if the owner decides to buy from me, they’re buying based on the happiness they believe the toy will bring to their cat.

Social media gives us the ability to be more of who we already are, it makes us more self centered because everyone’s social media feed is built for them specifically, no two feeds are alike. This is why picking your target audience is very important, once you know who your target is, you begin to create high quality content just for that group of people.

What Type of Content to Create

This depends heavily on your business and what your goals are. Everyone’s business is different, some of us cater to a mass market, some of us cater just to children and some of us cater to mature audiences and this is important to understand before you start creating content. You wouldn’t serve ads about men with their shirts off talking about their feelings and how much they desire to be in love with the perfect woman to guys who are interested in comic books and action movies, know your audience.

The best type format of content that has been proven to work well across all platforms has been video. With today’s technological advances there is no excuse anymore, video is the best way to engage with your audience and keep their attention. If you have trouble with this, it’s best to turn to the experts.