Introduction:
In order for us to know about the different types of content marketing, we first need to know about what content marketing is. And to understand the concept of content marketing, you first need to understand the idea of what “content “is and what one means when they use the term “marketing”.
So, what is marketing? In the most precise and easiest words, marketing entails all those activities that are needed to promote and or sell products or services. Most people might think of these activities as only the ones that include advertising and other means of persuasion but if those people couldn’t be further away from the concept of marketing if that is what they think what marketing is.
What is Marketing?
Marketing involves every activity that starts from the conception of the product or service till the time the product or service is actually sold. It is a vast field that includes understanding what your consumers want and how you can understand their psychology better which would help you in produce products and services that would appeal to your consumers and would also make the persuasion process easier. The concept of surveying the market and collecting data has always been one of the ways that help to understand your customer’s mindset.
What is the Content?
The term content, on the other hand, is normally used for information that is available on digital platforms. It can be in the form of text, video or audio. Different types of content trigger different types of emotions and responses from the audience.
Content Marketing:
So, what is content marketing? Now, that we have a clearer picture of what content and marketing separately mean, it will now be much easier to grasp the idea about what content marketing is. Simply, if we put together the two definitions of content and marketing together we can come up with an easy to understand definition for content marketing. So, content marketing involves all those activities that use any sort of digital content to persuade or create awareness about a product or service with the aim of selling it. The content can be visual content, written content or even audio content.
The basic idea behind content marketing is to provide valuable content or information to your target audience and use this to create a strong and helpful brand image about yourself or your brand. This helps brands to get value in return as well in terms of customers and sales revenue. The basic idea makes behind content marketing is very different from a commercial advertisement that only focuses on the persuasion of the customers.
An easier way to understand content marketing would be to think of yourself as a business that produces let’s say health and fitness products like protein shakes and mass gainers and etc. So, in this case, you will probably go on by providing your target audience with information that would address their health issues and in that content, you can also add in some ads about your relevant products that can help your target audience solve that particular issue.
Types of Content Marketing
The types of content marketing can be categorized into two main types, written content marketing, and content marketing done through videos.
Written or Text-based Content Marketing:
Like the name suggests this particular type of content marketing focuses on using text and written material for marketing. One example of text-based content marketing can be Wikipedia articles or pages. Business organizations have been observed to create a Wikipedia page and use the reliability of that platform for their benefit. There are a couple of other popular ways too that come under the umbrella of text-based content marketing.
Blogging:
Blogging refers to the use of information provided by the text. This usually focusses on information that proves to be useful for the readers and uses this as a source of providing information about the products that can help readers out in solving their related problems. Blogging is also one of the best ways to improve one’s SEO rankings which can help in driving traffic to your web pages and increase your conversion rates and sales revenues.
Social Media:
Social media has been known to be one of the best ways to use written content to engage target audiences and persuade them into taking action.
Video-based Content Marketing:
The best example of video-based content marketing can be taken from the platform YouTube because it has countless videos that tend to provide useful information on many topics that interest people and links to products or services are given below the video that lead you to pages with products or services that help in solving the issue or problem addressed in the video.
Whiteboard animations are also a very popular way of content marketing. There are other uses for whiteboard animations as well but content marketing is also one of the main reasons why whiteboard animations are used.
