What Is Content Marketing And How Did It Evolve?
Customers are evolving, today they know what marketing is and how it works, they feel it around them. The days when dry advertising messages influenced customer choice have passed. The brand and customers are now in a more dynamic relationship: marketers promote the brand, and customers either help or hinder the promotion - now they have all the possibilities in the world and therefore need more content.
Content marketing is becoming one of the main tools for smart marketers. Because content is marketing, it works so perfectly that you don’t even think about marketing. At the same time, it also evolves, it becomes dynamic, it exists separately from the other advertising channels.
So, content marketing is a marketing technology for creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain users from a specific target audience - in order to encourage users to take the necessary commercial action. The core task of the technology is to induce the consumer to target actions, to involve him in your conversion scenario. In other words, it is information obtained by your potential customer at the right time and in the right place.
How Does It Appear?
Content marketing is an integral part of the marketing strategy. No matter what the scale of the campaign is, the content has always been and will be the main thing that can attract an audience, except the quality and price of goods and services. Although, just like any phenomenon in this world, content marketing is not something that just appeared of nowhere. It is something that was founded, developed and further increased over the years.
But, if today, the words “marketing” and “content” are heard from all sides, at the beginning of the 21st century, not many people have heard of this. The concept of “content marketing” appeared and began to enter our life only in 2001. Of course, marketing was popular since the early birth of the business, but it was the first attempts in marketing evolution that is still being used in 2024.
Content marketing is older than all marketers taken together - if we consider the rock paintings about hunting as the first form of content. Joking aside, any detailed description of a product that is the real benefit to the consumer is assumed as content marketing.
For instance, in 1801 the Parisian bookstore Librairie Galignani began to use unusual techniques: the opening of the reading room, the release of their own books and newspapers; in 1888 the famous company Johnson & Johnson published a series of articles, including "Modern methods of antiseptic treatment of wounds," and distribute them among doctors who sell bandages.
In 1895 American machine builder John Deere, in order to attract the customers, published the magazine “The Furrow”. It is still produced in the circulation of 1.5 million copies and is distributed in 40 countries in 12 languages. Thus it is considered that it is the first ever example of content marketing, as this strategy is already around 120 old.
The model of marketing communication did not change much from the middle of the 20th century until its end. In order to sell the product or service as soon as possible, companies have focused their efforts mainly on finding a platform with the largest audience that is relevant to their target market. Then they started to apply the method of carpet bombardment by advertising messages. This approach is known as outbound marketing. At that time it was the only way to convey information about the product and brand to the consumer.
Not so long ago, from an outbound approach to marketing, a new form of communication with the audience began to develop - inbound marketing. In contrast to delivering a message to the masses, inbound marketing offered to create content that people themselves would look for. In the process of technology evolution and, as a result, the development of an inbound approach in marketing, its individual directions and forms began to develop.
And nowadays one of the most important components of inbound marketing is content marketing. The fundamental principle of content marketing is to create messages that are relevant to the interests of the target segment. Content marketing is an endless experiment. However, despite the fact that strategy and ways of use of content marketing have evolved, the goals are still the same: being useful to the audience.
The Benefits Of Content Marketing
Content marketing is somewhat different than regular internet advertising, and therefore allows you to further expand the coverage of your target audience during various promotional campaigns on the site on the Internet.
If the usual methods of Internet advertising provide a direct impact on the target audience and often annoy Internet users, then with content marketing and SEO, the impact is indirect, when potential buyers and consumers of services are invited to make their own choice based on the presented facts, arguments, conclusions. This is the main feature and advantage of content marketing.
Content marketing is not a quick sales method; it's a systematic work for the future. Due to content marketing, the company and its sites become more recognizable, strengthen their credibility, position themselves as experts in a particular field of activity. In this case, content marketing requires less cost than classic Internet advertising, which makes it more profitable.
An important distinction should be made between content marketing strategy and ordinary advertising in the Internet is the lack of "pressure" on search engines and Internet users: today, when search engines are less and less valued by the impact of links leading to websites, and users are less believable to "laudatory odd" in advertising, it is especially important to provide site visitors with objective information about different goods and services as possible. Providing such information is the main task of content marketing.
Consequently, in our digital society, the customers are more authorized and well-informed than ever before. This allows them to manage their finances better for purchases of all types. Therefore, in order to catch the customer`s attention and interest to the product content marketing should be the tool number one for every business strategy. Today's content marketing is a decent alternative to the traditional methods of Internet advertising and a great addition to them.
I hope you enjoyed this blog post about the evolution of content and content marketing for business branding and advertising.
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