What is content marketing and how can it help your organisation?

Are you looking for ways to reach new customers for your vegan organisation? Would you like to keep existing customers engaged or build brand awareness?

Content marketing could be the solution. It works well in business-to-business (B2B) settings, for business-to-consumer (B2C) or to raise support for not-for-profits, causes and campaigns.

If you’re not yet using content marketing within your marketing plan – or you are but not consistently – then today’s blog is your call to action.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is an effective type of marketing where you create and share content online that appeals to your target audience of potential and current customers. It isn’t about explicitly selling or even promoting your brand; instead, the idea is to stimulate interest in your products and services by providing content that your audience will find of value.

You’re reading a piece of content marketing right now, and, as you can see, it’s not about a hard sell!

Content marketing examples

The types of content you might share as part of your content marketing strategy include:

• Blog articles
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Emails
• Newsletters
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Social media posts
• And more…

Different types of content will usually be appropriate for different stages in the customer journey (more about this below) and for different platforms.

What are the benefits of using content marketing?

Content marketing is a subtle but powerful form of inbound marketing where you bring potential customers into your business by providing them with information that they will find helpful rather than reaching out to them with cold calls, sales pitches or other outbound marketing techniques.

You can use your content to help people to understand how your products or services meet their needs. It can also be a great way to show your expertise, build trust, promote brand awareness and keep your business top of mind for when a potential customer is ready to buy or take action (e.g. make a donation, volunteer, etc.)

In addition, good content marketing should help you to build a community around your business on social media because it gives you a steady stream of targeted content to share with your followers.

To read more about this, please download our free giveaway. It goes on to discuss:

• Why content marketing is good for SEO too
• Does content marketing work?
• Understanding the customer journey: the awareness stage; the consideration/evaluation stage; the decision-making stage
• Content marketing is about connection.