What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an extremely useful way of attracting an audience to your social media platforms or your website.
Content marketing is a way to create interesting and useful content to attract customers who are interested in what you have to offer.
In its simplest form, think of it as “You Ask. We Answer”.
Think of the questions that your prospective clients might ask and make sure you address these on your social media or website.
You should produce content that is relevant to your target audience, and do it consistently so that people will keep coming back for more. In the end, this will help you achieve your desired goal – whether it’s getting more customers, increasing brand awareness, building your email list, or increasing bookings.
One of the best ways to create content that keeps people coming back is to use a blog for your company website. Most companies have some kind of blog where they share information about their products and services, but business blogs can be so much more than this.
This is where content marketing comes in.
When you create content, it’s not about selling to people. It’s about giving them information that will help them make decisions. If you do it correctly, content marketing can be a very successful way to drive traffic and leads to your business.
What is content marketing? Well here’s an example of content marketing 101:
One of the most visited pages on our Wedding Photography site was a page addressing the “Twenty Questions Your Should Always Ask Your Wedding Photographer Before Booking”.
It almost got as many hits as our home page because so many people were searching some of the topics in our list of questions and then finding our page in the search results.
That page actually ranked number 1 worldwide for “questions to ask wedding photographer” and “questions for wedding photographer” for years. It also became the most copied page on our website and we frequently found other photographers had lifted it word for word from our website (Hint – use copyscape.com to check for issues like this)
As well as being a featured page on your website, you could also put that out as 20 different social media posts (I know we are always looking for ideas for posts, right?).
So here are the twenty questions we used – you’ll need to answer these yourself but feel free to adapt these to your business needs:-
1. How would you define your style?
2. I have certain ideas I would like – can you do these?
3. Can you show me a complete set of recent wedding pictures?
4. Are you insured?
5. Are you a member of any professional photography organisations?
6. What happens if you fall ill on the day?
7. What happens if your camera develops a fault?
8. What happens if it rains?
9. Can my other guests take pictures?
10. Can you take a picture of my favourite Aunt/Uncle/Cat etc and how long will all the family group shots take?
11. When will I see my pictures and when will I receive my Album, oh, and do I get digital copies of my images?
12. How can I actually be sure that you’ll be any good and that we’ll get along?
13. Being Wedding Photographer of the Year doesn’t that mean you’ll be out of my price range?
14. Who will actually take my photographs?
15. So if we have two photographers on the day – will that cost me more?
16. Do you cope well under pressure and what about any emergencies on the day?
17. (Possibly the most important wedding photography question) How far ahead do I need to book my photographer?
18. My Wedding is not in Scotland is that a problem?
19. Wonderful. How do we take this forward?
20. Great. How can we get in touch?
SO – Can you think of any additional questions to add to this list? Please stick them in the comments below.
So hopefully you’ve gone a little way to learning what is content marketing. If you currently use Content Marketing on your platforms, how is it working out for you?
