What is content/digital marketing  

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, deploying, sharing, and publishing content that gets in front of the right audiences. The goal of content marketing is not only advertising products or a brand directly, but reaching a specific audience and answering their questions, and relieving their current pain points. Through content marketing campaigns, you are reaching out to target audiences in every stage of your sales journey, which is why you are nurturing prospects throughout their buying journey, and consistently creating new interest in your brand. 

This strategy results in content that answers the questions your target audience has, while also building the connection between your brand and the audience. Your audience will provide you with a clear sign of what interests your audience most, making it easier to create new content that piques their curiosity. 

The key is meeting your audience where they are, and producing content that is tailored specifically to these channels. For others, you will need to define a specific strategy to get your content out there to the public. 

Think about what kind of content you are creating, and what channels you are marketing this content to. Once you decide what kind of content you are going to market with, it is time to pick out your specific content channels. 

Specifically, you want to produce content that speaks to people at various stages in your marketing funnel, also known as your buyer journey. Your company can use content marketing to get leads, build the case for your product or service while someone is researching what to buy, and close sales. You can use a variety of channels to promote your content, such as blogs, social media, or email marketing. 

Some channels enable on-platform distribution--social media or email marketing, for example--whereas others, such as blog posts or podcasts, do not. You can decide whether you want to share your video content to a social media platform, a landing page, or the co-marketing marketer's site. 

Similarly, related content gets noticed on social media campaigns or email campaigns, leading more people to visit your website. Social media--Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Medium, and Instagram, among others--is a proven, simple way to get your content out there. 

You could stick to video basics, such as Whiteboard Videos, Vlogs, or simple Product Reviews, but there are plenty of opportunities to get more creative and produce compelling content that more easily catches and also keeps the attention of your potential customers. Whether you are just starting to form a strategy, or updating an existing one, it never hurts to brainstorm new ways to create and share content your audience wants. Having a strong content strategy in place can make sure that you are creating content that is truly valuable for your audiences, and that you are getting it in front of them effectively. 

Creating content without knowing what works for your audience and brand is a waste of time and resources. It is critical that you provide content that engages your prospects before they even begin their buyer's journey, and draws them into the universe that your brand has created. Then, you need to learn to create and promote great, helpful, informative, educational, and inspiring content that gets in front of your audience at just the right time. 

For example, when my company opens up enrollment in one of our courses, the types of content that we post change, Here are some useful tips to check out this new product. For example, almost 100% of my content is how-to-content, teaching people how to optimize their websites. For instance, when I asked a group of customers recently about what motivated them to invest in one of my enterprise programs, I noticed a large number cited the video content. 

An SEO content strategy is about providing useful information and answering these research questions, as blog posts, which the customer might discover naturally by using search engines. This problem looks at what kinds of information different archetypes of buyers are looking for in their purchase journey and maps out the customer's touchpoints, preferred communications channels, and -- to an extent -- the format of content, though that is also a problem with a content strategy. Content marketing allows companies to reach, engage with, and convert people to customers that would otherwise never be seen, using the topics customers use and producing the content they consume on their website, in order to answer customers' critical questions. 

Content marketing helps businesses build enduring brand loyalty, deliver valuable information to consumers, and build the desire to buy products from a business in the future. Content marketing provides extra content to use for social media marketing, and it also helps SEO efforts by creating natural inbound links and building up a good body of the content on the site, which is found by search engines. 

Content is information, but can be delivered via myriad channels (videos, graphics, live events, apps, social media posts, emails). Content marketing is creating and delivering relevant, helpful content -- for example newsletters, white papers, social media posts, blog posts, videos, etc. -- to current and prospective customers. 

In short, the process of digital content marketing needs to take place on both a company and a service experience level, as consumers are accessed through digital content, their experience itself is dependent upon a complex web of relationships across content marketing channels like websites and videos. For example, libraries and doc-providers, acting as middlemen, may provide digital content such as e-books and journal articles to users according to their search results via an electronic channel. 

To make sure that you are constantly producing content and sharing it with your prospects and customers, use either a calendar of social media posts or a content editorial calendar. Make sure that the content is found by different buyer personas and targeted audiences, and shared. Lush Cosmetics Instagram accounts are brand-driven and complementary to the rest of their marketing content: If a page did not have the words "Lush Cosmetics" somewhere in the profile, customers likely still knew that the profile was from Lush. 

While the channel is used to syndicate content from other channels, social media can be a content-first medium, such as what happens with Instagram Stories and Facebook, where the content is created instantly within its platform specifically for those channels.