What Is Content Marketing and Why Do Businesses Need It?

Back at the end of April, VoIP Supplys’ Garrett Smith joined his fellow local marketers on the panel, Why Content Marketing Matters, hosted by the Ad Club of Buffalo.

In attendance that evening was Jennifer Wozniak, Marketing Assistant at Yourbrain Media, Inc. and writer of WNY Online and Social Media Marketing News, who wrote a great recap of the event that also serves as a helpful how-to guide for content marketing.

Wozniak’s article, In content marketing, consider your audience first, first explains that, “Content marketing is more than talking about your product; it’s about understanding your audience, knowing their interests and creating content for them.

She then laid out three key tenets of content marketing.

Why use content marketing?:

“It engages the user to keep a relationship with us and the company and that’s what we are going for.” – Mitch Mirksy, Fisher Price Digital Marketing Manager

What should I post?

“What is this content going to support? Maybe it’s a new category launch, new product or service. Develop campaign specific metrics: reach, traffic, number of downloads or direct sales. Who’s the audience, what do they want? Use Google trends and keyword search tool to see what people are searching for and see what’s trending on Twitter.” – Garrett Smith, VoIP Supply CMO

Content Planning and Scheduling

Wozniak sums up the panels thoughts on planning and scheduling by noting that:

Most marketers on the panel agreed that creating a calendar helped insure they had material ready and also helped meet their objectives. However, most cautioned that you should allow a certain amount of flexibility to react to real-world events.

[Crista] Finn Geary [of Crista Geary Creative] and a co-worker planned out a calendar a month in advance with daily postings. She said posts received the most engagement from fans at 7 p.m.

For more examples and stories on how to customize a content marketing strategy to your unique fan/customer-base.