As a business owner, or a new digital marketer, you may have asked yourself on more than one occasion: what is content marketing?! With what seems to be speed-of-light developments and changes in SEO practices, social media and other online branding outlets it is very difficult to maintain a steady grasp of effective marketing practices that can yield positive results. One thing in all of this hectic change remains consistent - content marketing works, and is here to stay. It feeds into SEO rankings, original content attracts participants and brand ambassadors, it builds a community and most important it encourages interactivity. So how does it work?

What is Content Marketing?

To sum up the big question: content marketing refers to creating original, regular and engaging information that users/viewers/audience will find useful, entertaining, informative or in some way meaningful. This information does not necessarily mean it has to be written, great content can include the following:
- Videos
- Ebooks
- Mobile Applications
- Interactive Games
- Infographics
- Blogs
- Stories
- Presentations
- & much more!

Image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The idea behind original, engaging content is that "sky is the limit" so to speak - if you can imagine it, you can create it. And always - I mean ALWAYS keep in mind what people will find meaningful, no point in boring someone with content it will most certainly not live up to its purpose.

How to Create (Marketing) Content

This is the hard part: creating regular, interesting and engaging information. How do you always create something engaging with limited time? It is not easy by any means - creating great content requires time, planning and constant effort. Something which is not considered with most small business organizations because it is hard to measure the success of great content - it is not tangible per say (at least not clearly, and not yet) as it does not directly correlate to more sales, or increase in revenue. The best way to start is to share ideas or knowledge in which your organization specializes in. But that is not all: you also need to make this knowledge creative, interactive and eye-grabbing.

While I cannot tell you what to create, I can help share some freebies that may help you take your content to the next level. Use the resources below to help you time-manage, and simplify your content creation:

- Infographic Building Tools
- Short Video Snippets (Vine)
- Ebook Tools
- Blogging Platforms
- Creative Presentation Tools

That should be enough to get anyone started on putting in creativity to some great ideas!

Why is it Effective?

Plain and simple answer: because you are creating information that people want or need. You are attracting ("pull strategy") users to your content by catering to their interests as opposed to doing paid advertisements ("push strategy") and interrupting them at some point during their online browsing. After getting a grasp of content marketing the next challenge becomes standing out from the rest of the content out there, there are millions of blogs on millions of different topics - your content has to stand out and grab someone's attention, help them solve a problem, make their life easier, encourage them to read, look, share, interact, comment.

There has to be a purpose to your content, just like there is a purpose to your brand.