What is Content Marketing?

By Guest BloggerDec 04, 2012

Dave Crader explains the basics of content marketing in relation to SEO and the online channel. He'll reveal Evolve's content marketing strategy in its simplest form and will go over a case study that proves its effectiveness. By the end of this blog you'll know where to begin with your content marketing strategy and what your goals should be.

"Hi. I'm Dave Crader, Web Marketing Strategist, here at Evolve Creative Group. Today we're going to be going over what content marketing is, and why it is so important to integrate into your online marketing strategy. In future blogs, we'll go over how to develop a content marketing strategy of your own, but in today's blog, we're just going to be going over the basics.

Content marketing is a relatively new form of marketing that uses educational content to get your brand in front of potential customers. In its simplest form, it works like this - you're going to perform a keyword and market research to figure out the topics that your customers are interested in learning about.

Now, by doing this research, this will allow you to make content based on that research. Now, this content can come in the form of blog posts, videos, podcast, infographics, slide decks, whatever you have the resources for. You're going to create content based on that keyword and market research. By doing that, you'll be able to get more traffic from search engines to that content.

Eventually, once those visitors come to your site, you can convert them into a sale, into a lead, into a Facebook Like, whatever your goal is. It could be anything, whatever you choose. That's it. That's content marketing in a nutshell. It's my favorite because once you create this content, it doesn't disappear. It's going to continue to provide these benefits for years after you create it.

Now, since I like to use an example for everything, I'll walk you through an example of how we use content marketing here at Evolve to expand our business.A few months ago, I was doing some keyword research and I came across this keyword, "check for duplicate content." Now, this is a topic about SEO and since I'm an SEO specialist, I knew a lot about this topic. So I wrote a pretty detailed blog post about it, about 1,000 words, used some pictures, lots of headlines.

It's a pretty easy read. It has gotten a couple of comments. People like it. Search engines like it too, because within a month, we appear on the first page of Google for that keyword. That's awesome, right? We haven't got a lead from it yet, but we get hundreds of visitors to our blog every month, because of that article I wrote around that keyword, "check for duplicate content".

We're getting brand awareness. Hopefully, one day, we'll get a lead from it. But if not, who cares? We're getting social shares from it. We're getting comments, brand awareness. There are so many benefits. That post, it's going to be there forever. It's going to be continuing to give Evolve those benefits forever.

If you have any questions or feedback, please leave them in the comment field below or contact me directly on LinkedIn."

Evolve Marketing - Akron, OH Digital Marketing Agency
Developing strategies. Designing experiences.

Driving growth.

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