The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Their definition is solid in my opinion. But it could use some clarity.
It means that content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.
Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you. They will purchase your productand prefer it over competitors’ options.
In contrast to one-off advertising, content marketing shows that you actually care about your customers.
Today, more than ever before, people want to feel like you care about them. The world is louder and noisier than ever before, and attention is our most valuable resource.
Keep that in mind as we take a look at some of the different types of content marketing.
Content Marketing Overview
When Joe Pulizzi founded the Content Marketing Institute in 2010, I don’t think he knew exactly how spot-on he would be, let alone how successful CMI would become.
Since the foundation of content marketing is simply high-quality content and storytelling, you can already see that the activity has been around longer than the term itself.
There’s still plenty to learn from those first offline content marketing activities that pre-date the Internet, social media, and the like.
However, any successful content marketing campaign today can hardly ignore the online part.
Because storytelling has changed over the years, the attention of people stretches to more places than a few years ago, and marketers have to make sure that they tell stories in the year we actually live in.
There are three major categories where you can put content marketing efforts these days: online, offline, and hybrids.
The best way to learn how to be a great content marketer is by example.
That’s why I’ll show you 15 great examples of content marketing in all categories. Then, you can model them, tweak them, and apply them to your own businesses.
First, though, I’m going to show you how you can create a content marketing strategy. Then, you can use the examples at the end for inspiration.