Questions answered in this module

• What is content marketing?
• What are the major types of content marketing?
• Is content marketing right for my business?
• What type of content marketing strategy is right for my business?
• How do I distribute content to my target audience?
• How do I hire and vet content marketers?

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the creation and use of content to grow your business. Though often thought of in terms of blogging, it includes many different content formats, like:

• Ebooks
• Videos
• Newsletters
• Podcasts
• White papers
• Slide decks
• Infographics
• Quizzes

Content marketing is used across the entire funnel—for generating brand awareness, improving sales enablement, and more—but we’ll focus on how to use it to get more customers.

Two important parts of content marketing:

1. Creation: Producing content—usually either through an editorial team or people who use your product
2. Distribution: Sharing content with a wider audience through owned, acquired, and organic channels. We’ll only cover owned and acquired distribution in this chapter.

Why learn content marketing

When successful, content marketing can:

• Drive consistent, ongoing traffic and leads: Content captures your audience’s attention and gets them interested in your brand. The more satisfied visitors are with your content, the more likely they’ll convert into paying customers and share your content with their networks.
• Develop brand reputation and authority: Content alone can improve visibility of your brand, and good content enhances its credibility. It establishes your company as a leader and gives potential customers confidence about your product.
• Generate compounding results: The content that you create today can drive traffic and leads for months, even years, to come. This is especially true for “evergreen” content, content that remains relevant over a long period of time.

Who should use content marketing

Most companies can benefit from content marketing.

Why? Besides getting more visitors to your site, content also helps grow direct sales—so you won’t have to spend as much time pitching your products to potential customers.

Most niches are already saturated with content, though, making it hard for any business to jump in. That said, the companies with the most content marketing potential usually have:

• A dedicated marketer: This person understands that it’s not enough to go through the motions of creating and publishing content. They’re strategic and want to try new things for better results.
• A long time frame for returns: They understand that content-driven growth is a long-term play and aren’t rushed for results.  

Is content marketing right for my business?

Content marketing can help sell all kinds of products, but it’s especially helpful for selling new or innovative products that need more explaining.

Example: Service

Service is an app that helps travelers get compensated for unexpected flight delays and cancellations. Knowing that their product can raise a lot of questions, Service’s team created a 30-second video to explain how it works.

Compared to a traditional cold call, this video is faster at describing a product and more visually appealing.

Example: Pillow Cube

Pillow Cube sells square-shaped foam pillows, something that doesn’t seem very appealing without context.

Knowing how unusual their product looks, the Pillow Cube team created a 95-second video to explain why their pillows are shaped that way.

Content marketing is especially effective for B2B SaaS companies because compared to ecommerce brands, B2B SaaS products are usually more complex and harder to sell.

For example, it’s harder to explain the benefits of a new accounting software than it is to describe the benefits of a calculator. But content marketing can convey this information in a more easily digestible way.

Watch how QuickBooks uses a 90-second video to explain its software. It’s faster and more visually appealing than describing these benefits through a traditional cold call.

Just because a piece of content can work better than a cold call doesn’t mean content marketing is right for every company. To see if it makes sense for your brand, we’ve developed a simple framework based on five variables.

Ideal conditions for content marketing

• Low constraints (faces few obstacles)
• High resources (has access to many resources)
• High time to results (can wait at least six months before seeing results)
• Low-moderate competition (exists in a niche or uncompetitive market)
• High consumption behavior (audience actively consumes content before making purchase decisions)

If at least three of these conditions apply to your company, content marketing can work.

But if only two or less apply, other growth channels might be a better fit.

Important note: Our framework isn’t definitive. It’s a rule of thumb, but there are companies that make content work without checking three out of five boxes.

Here’s an example. Although it usually takes a few months before seeing any content marketing results, it’s also possible to see progress within a shorter amount of time. This might happen if:

• Your brand already has an audience (email subscribers or social media followers).
• Your content strategy focuses on creating and distributing content to current customers.
• You're in an emerging category with minimal competition.

In these cases, you may see content marketing results in less time than if you were building an audience from the ground up.