If you’re trying to expand your creative business, chances are you’ve heard the term “content marketing”. You may have been told that it’s a great way to reach new customers or that it helps you build your business’s profile and profits.
But what exactly is content marketing?
In this tutorial, I’ll help you get up to speed. We’ll start by looking at a simple definition of content marketing. Then, we’ll talk about how it can help your creative business. You'll learn the basics of being your own content marketer.
Although content marketing has many benefits, it comes with some downsides too. I’ll cover those in section 3. Finally, we’ll look at some strategies you can use to be successful in content marketing.
1. What is content marketing?
First of all, here’s the definition of content marketing given on Dictionary.com:
Marketing that tries to attract customers by distributing informational content potentially useful to the target audience, rather than by advertising products and services in the traditional way.
So let’s unpack that a little. “Attracting customers” is clear enough, but what’s “informational content”? Some informational content marketing examples are:
- a blog post
- a video
- a webinar
- a podcast
- social media posts
What’s key is that the information is “potentially useful to the target audience”. Provide free information that’s useful, enlightening, and hey, maybe even fun. You may convert strangers into fans.
As the dictionary definition notes, this is quite different from traditional marketing. Here’s a simple example to illustrate that.
Let’s say you run a small web design studio and you want to attract new customers. Here’s how the content marketing approach would differ from the traditional approach:
Traditional marketing
With traditional marketing, you’d create an ad and pay to place it in front of potential customers—perhaps in magazines, as sponsored search results, or as banner ads on websites.
In that case, your ad might read something like:
Looking for a fresh website design for a great price? Try ABC Design Studio! For a limited time only, get 10% off all design work.
OK, you could come up with better ad copy, but you get the idea. Traditional marketing is aimed at convincing potential customers to choose you. It’s very direct, and if you’re persuasive enough, it can lead to immediate sales. But if you don’t grab people’s attention, they’ll tune you out.
Content marketing
The content marketing approach is very different. It’s more about playing the long-term game. In this case, you might start posting articles on your website or blog. For example, you could give small business owners useful information on the elements of good website design, mistakes to avoid when setting up a website, and more.
Then, promote those articles to draw readers to your blog, and at the end of each article, try to entice them to stay in contact. You could do this by offering more tips in exchange for their email address.
Once they’ve signed up, follow up with a series of emails providing more useful, free information. Also, try to entice them to sign up as a paying customer.
This is just an example. There are lots of content marketing strategies out there using a variety of media. We’ll examine some options for successful content marketing later on.
The point is, content marketing is less direct than traditional marketing. You're not asking strangers to part with their money immediately. You’re trying to build trust with them first. It takes longer to go from first contact to money in the bank. But if you do it well, it can be very effective, as we’ll discover shortly.
What’s new?
We’ve looked at content marketing vs. traditional marketing to help clarify the definition. The truth is, advertisers have been using some form of what we now call content marketing for decades.
Think of the “advertorials” you’d see in newspapers (like the Suburban Home example below). Or the brochures with useful info that subtly invited you to use a particular product to solve your problem.
What’s new is that changes in technology and consumer preferences have given content marketing some advantages that it didn’t have in the days of print, and as a result, it’s become much more widely used. We’ll look at some of those advantages in the next section.
2. Why use content marketing?
As we’ve seen, content marketing is quite an indirect approach. So why take the time to do it? What can it do for your creative business? I’ll answer those questions by covering some of the benefits of content marketing.
People hate ads
OK, that might be putting it a little strongly. But more and more people are using ad-blocking software. By mid-2023, there were 912 million people using ad-blocking tools.
And even of those people who aren’t actively blocking ads, many are tuning them out. The average click-through rate of banner ads is only 0.06%. And about half of clicks on mobile ads are accidental, according to this HubSpot roundup.
While these stats are for online ads, don’t think that print or TV are doing much better. People, especially young people, are increasingly tuning out traditional ads. They want useful information, which is exactly what content marketing aims to provide.
Your fans become your advertisers
If you produce stuff that strikes a chord with your readers or viewers, they’ll share it with their friends. This gives you much broader reach for no extra investment.
In rare cases, a post or video may “go viral”, reaching huge numbers of people. It would cost a fortune to reach them via traditional advertising.
Even if only a few people share your posts, it’s still a tremendously effective way to reach new customers. When people see your content, they notice that it’s been recommended by someone they trust or respect—maybe a friend or family member. That gives you a powerful head-start.
Even if the recommendation is from someone they follow but don’t really know, it’s still a connection. That gives you an advantage over simply being discovered out of the blue.
People love free stuff
Who doesn’t love a freebie? That’s particularly true online.
In the early days of the web, pretty much everything was free. The internet was built to ease the free flow of information. These days, people are used to paying for products, services, or information they value.
But there’s still a lingering expectation that at least the basics should be free. By giving away free, useful information, you’re giving people what they want. That’s a great way to build a relationship with them.
It doesn’t cost you much
You can get started with content marketing for little or zero up-front investment. A snazzy website helps, but people will still share and value a post written on a free blog or social media.
Of course, you can choose to hire a content marketing agency. As you can imagine, content marketing services are not necessarily cheap.
It’s how people make buying decisions these days
People don’t tend to make snap buying decisions online. They prefer to use all the information out there to help them compare products and do research.
According to a PwC study, 80% of people do online research before buying any items, even small purchases like books, music, and movies. Other studies have found similar results.
Expecting strangers to buy right away is unrealistic, particularly if your brand is not well-known. It’s more effective to engage with them first.
Give them information that helps them with their research. Try to build trust so that when they do buy, they buy from you.
You build your profile
Many of the people who read your posts or watch your videos will never buy anything from you. But even so, that effort wasn’t wasted. You’ve built brand awareness, gained credibility, and raised your profile.
If the content is on your own website, you’ve probably improved your search engine rankings too.
Long-term sustainability
When you buy an ad, you get a flood of visitors and possibly customers. But then, when people are no longer seeing that ad, the tap gets turned off. You’re back to square one—unless you pay again... and again... and again.
A popular blog post or video can keep providing you with new customers for years. As long as people can still find the post, you can get many new visitors for a post you wrote years ago.
The more good content you produce and the more popular you become, the more your traffic increases, both for new posts and old ones. It’s a cumulative effect, unlike paying for leads, which is a one-time deal.
3. Challenges of content marketing
Although content marketing has lots of advantages, it’s not a panacea. There are significant downsides.
Don't worry too much, though—just pay attention. Even the most successful content marketing company has to constantly keep an eye on the following topics.
Everyone else is doing it
According to Demand Metric, 90% of businesses use content marketing. Yes, the popularity of content marketing is an argument in favour of using it. But that popularity also means that it’s a very crowded field.
You know what's true for any industry? There are probably many blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels covering your topic.
The sheer volume of it all has led to a frequent complaint of “information overload”. That makes it hard to stand out and gain an audience.
It takes time and effort
I mentioned low cost as one of the advantages of content marketing, but don’t be fooled. Although there’s little cash investment required, you will need to put a lot of hours and effort into it.
It doesn't matter if you’re composing blog posts or recording podcasts. Maybe you're indulging in the distraction by a thousand cuts that is involved in maintaining an active social media presence.
Either way, content marketing sucks away time and energy that you could give to other parts of your business. And you may not see a return for a long time.
You could hire someone to do it, of course, but that could be expensive. And you need to be careful who you hire, because authenticity and reliability are key. Dishing out bad information will damage your reputation as much as good information will build it.
It’s hard to measure success
How can you tell if you’re doing it right? Increased website traffic? More social media followers? A bigger email list? Or should you measure it only based on actual customers brought in?
Maybe you’re not seeing much tangible growth. But are you getting positive comments and engagement? Are you building a profile with potential clients and influential industry figures?
Is that enough?
It takes time to build an audience. But how long should you stick at it before deciding that enough is enough?
Some of the benefits of content marketing can be tracked quite closely. But others are intangible, and it can be difficult to tell which one to use.
4. Content marketing strategies
We’ve got some clarity on what content marketing is, and we’ve looked at its main pros and cons. So what strategies can you use to be successful in your content marketing?
Pick your channels
As I mentioned earlier, there are many different ways to do content marketing. Here’s a brief, non-exhaustive list of options:
- Write a blog.
- Create an audio podcast.
- Produce videos for YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or elsewhere.
- Build a following on social media.
- Create some fun, informative, shareable infographics.
- Write guest posts or articles for popular publications.
- Write eBooks or white papers and distribute them on your website and elsewhere.
- Run a free webinar.
A good content marketing strategy will include several of these. However, it’s important not to spread yourself too thin.
Make an honest assessment of your content marketer skills. Decide which of those you can do best. Ask yourself these questions:
- Do you have the personality and presentation skills to produce fun, engaging videos?
- Are you more comfortable with the written word?
- How are your technical skills in each area?
- What will fit best in your schedule—dedicating lots of time to long-form content, or producing shorter stuff more often?
When you’re picking channels to use for content marketing, consider what you’re trying to achieve. What is your target audience looking for? What does the competition look like?
For more on this important topic, see the following tutorial:
Don’t be boring
The words “corporate blog” make me want to stab myself with a fork. They bring painful images of dull, stilted propaganda churned out by corporate PR. They’ve just heard that all the cool kids are doing it, so they think "we should do it too". But, of course, every post has to be approved by five levels of management before it can go out.
Small businesses can make a similar mistake by mixing up credibility with “sounding like an economics textbook”. You could even ask the best content marketing agency in the world—everyone has seen the same mistake.
If you want your content to be popular, you don’t have to “dumb it down” completely and post only cute cat videos. But you do have to make it personal, engaging, informative, and at least somewhat fun to read or watch.
Don’t be cheap
Another mistake I’ve seen businesses make is to churn out masses of substandard content. It's a cynical attempt to drive up search-engine rankings for particular keywords. They don’t want to invest the time and effort in creating truly useful content, so they hire the cheapest possible freelancers to throw something together fast.
That misses the point of content marketing entirely. It should be about building trust with your customers. What use is a high search-engine ranking if the content doesn't inspire confidence?
Make a conversion plan
It’s easy to get caught up in creating great content and to forget that this is a marketing strategy. At some point, you will have to convert all those visitors or followers into paying customers.
If you’re posting your content on social media, you’ll need to link back regularly to your website and provide enticing reasons for people to click through.
Your site also needs to be set up to receive visitors and encourage them to sign up. You can achieve this with a dedicated landing page. Grab a landing page template from the Envato library or learn more about them in this article:
Then you’ll need to set up an email marketing campaign to convert those signed-up visitors to paying customers—you can find out more about doing that in this email marketing series, or try one of these email templates from Envato.
You’ll need an email marketing campaign to convert signed-up visitors into paying customers. Find out more about doing that in this email marketing series. Or you can try one of these email templates from Envato.
Learn more about email marketing:
And if you’re blogging on your own site, make sure it encourages people to do more than just read an article and leave. There are lots of options for making your site more “sticky”.
You can have email signup forms pop up or appear at the bottom of the post, or include calls to action within the post linking to related content. You may also want to offer white papers, short eBooks, or other types of “gated” content. To receive these, people have to sign up.
Having a professional-looking website helps too. Try one of these WordPress themes from Envato if you want to give your site a makeover. You can find themes aimed at specific types of businesses, from general corporate themes to customized real estate, technology, or retail templates. Find more examples here:
Get started with your content marketing plan
I hope these content marketing examples gave you a clear idea of what content marketing is and how it can help your creative business attract more customers.
We also looked at the pros and cons and explored some content marketing strategies for success. It’s a big topic, so check out our other tutorials to keep your content marketing skills sharp.
You can also rely on an Envato's subscription. There are so many assets that can help you boost your content, such as video templates, graphics, fonts, and more.
Discover how to measure the success of your content marketing. Take the leap and start a blog for your business (one that doesn’t make you want to stab yourself with a fork).
