What is Content Marketing Content Marketing and its Importance in your Business	Visited: 1935 4.8/5.0 (18 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Kitz January 26, 2009

'What is content marketing?' - A general user of Internet, after hearing the words 'content marketing' will have this first question in his mind.

"Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. In contrast to traditional marketing methods that aim to increase sales or awareness through interruption techniques, content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action." As described under wikipedia entry for content marketing.

In a layman's language, whenever you read, see or listen to something that interests you, the content that engages you, whether it be a post on a blog, an article published on a magazine, an informative video, an interesting menu card in a restaurant, the striking headline in your local newspaper that fetches your interest, the newsletter or the content in a website, is a form of content marketing.

Importance of Content Marketing: The USP (Unique selling point or quality) of content marketing is, its unique and your very own engaging content, that talks distinctly about the entity whether it be you, the company, or the product/services you want to sell. This USP really is important as well to engage your customer/visitor reading something new & interesting and making you stand out of the rush of other related product/service providers. The content marketing, if its USP is retained, helps you positioning your business as the trusted resource in you niche.

"Marketers may use content marketing as a means of achieving a variety of business goals, such as thought leadership, lead generation, increasing direct sales, improving retention and more." says Wikipedia page for Content Marketing, this itself shows the importance of content marketing in retaining your customers.

Another important USP of content marketing is that it is Permissive not interruptive to consumer. Unlike the old interruption marketing, content marketing is based on the user permissions, if a user want, he/she reads or uses the content that might be on your blog, website, ezine, magazine, newsletter, white-paper, email, social media content or elsewhere.

The content (whether it be the text on your site of blog or digital content in the images or video) should be so intriguing that attract the user for perform some positive action such as subscribing to your feeds, filling up forms, spreading your content to social media, etc.

To retain your customer, you need to have a successful content marketing in place and to market your content successfully either you should write content yourself, keeping in mind your targeted readers, customer base, or should take content writing service from such experts who really understands and knows your niche and knows what interests your customer base. The intriguingly written, unique content can help retaining your business customers as well as building the new consumer base.