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Content marketing is gaining a lot of traction in the mindset of marketers and, especially, small business owners. I recently presented a seminar on the topic at the Brew Small Business Expo in Perth. While doing my research, I realised much of what is being written about content marketing assumes the reader understands the basic components. I didn’t fully understand them when I started, so I thought it made sense to lay the groundwork here.

First, content marketing is nothing more than an online strategy to educate your customers. The goal is to discover what your customers want, then deliver the information to them in a constructive way. When done successfully, content marketing is the perfect method to establish your expertise and gain the trust of your prospects. You’re not selling to your customers, you’re educating them.
Content marketing has three components:

• SEO
• Content
• Social Media

Each of these components is integral to a successful campaign. Working in unison, the components form a tight cycle, each enhancing the performance of the other two. If one is missing, your content marketing strategy will lose effectiveness or fail altogether.

SEO
Search engine optimisation is the part of content marketing that points people to your website when they’re searching for information. The important thing to remember for this discussion is that only about 25% of SEO is in your control, driven by the keywords used on your website. The remaining influencers are outside your control and have to do with links to your website from other reputable websites. It’s also influenced by search engine rankings. For this reason, your online strategy requires more than just good SEO techniques.

Content
The heart of content marketing is the original material created for your company, products and services. Designed to inform and educate, your content should be developed in anticipation of the information required by your prospective customers. To assist the SEO component, keywords should factor heavily into every piece of material developed. Creating several different types of collateral is the most effective strategy. White papers, case studies, website copy, videos, e-books, photos, and presentations are examples of original content you can post on your website to assist consumers in making decisions about your offering.

Social Media
The final component of content marketing is social media. Without going into a discussion about specific tools, the idea behind social media is to give your content “legs” by driving traffic directly to your website. You can do this in a variety of ways, and it’s recommended you deploy more than one social media channel. The more traffic visiting your website, the more attractive it becomes to search engines, which then favour your website with better rankings.

Once you’ve established an effective cycle for your website, each component will boost the effectiveness of the other two. It’s not a complicated concept, but implementing a successful content marketing strategy is time-consuming and requires planning. The great thing about it is you can develop it piece by piece, over time, without investing a huge sum of money. I’ve done it for my own business and intend to share those experiences here.