Content Marketing Definition

Content marketing is a blanket term describing all those forms of marketing that involve content of some kind, which might include blog posts, email marketing campaigns, ebooks, guides, infographics, and more.

Content marketing is an important inbound marketing strategy for digital marketers because it not only boosts lead generation but also provides a source of (ideally) genuine value. This serves the dual purpose of creating new business while improving customer experience.

Content Marketing Example

A business decides to improve their content marketing efforts by starting a blog. The blog is designed to respond to common customer questions about their product or service. Each post provides valuable answers, guides, or tips relating to the product or service along different steps of the buying cycle. Since the blog provides genuinely useful information, traffic to the website increases.

The business then uses their blog to build an email marketing list—perhaps within each blog post is a call to action which offers visitors a free ebook in exchange for signing up with their email address. The business can then send the visitor further content marketing messages, eventually winning them over and, hopefully, encouraging them to become a lifelong customer.

Why is Content Marketing Important in Strategic Marketing?

Customer Experience

Content marketing performs best when the content being provided is of genuinely high quality; providing actionable advice or real answers to common questions will attract qualified buyers. However, it also has the “side effect” of improving overall customer experience, since not only will you be generating additional traffic and leads, your visitors will also view you as an authority in your field.

Lead Generation

Since people will be attracted to your site because of your great content, you’ll have further opportunities to market to them, prove to them why you’re the best choice, or why they should choose you over a competitor.