What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a type of inbound marketing. It is a marketing technique that is intended to address the target group with informative, advisory and entertaining content to convince them of their own company and their range of services or their brand and to win or keep them as customers. The strategic planning of content creation is called a content strategy. The responsibility for this often lies in marketing, in larger companies under the direction of a Chief Content Officer.

Purposes and Demarcation of Content Marketing

Content marketing does not focus on sales, but on communicating with customers and prospects through programs that value elements of brand capital (e.g. social responsibility, cultural heritage, ability to innovate). This marketing communication is thus distinguished from advertising that must sell (spot, banner advertising, product placement) or sponsorship that brings visibility for a brand. In the same way as for advertising, it is possible to measure the return on investment of a content strategy, which ultimately aims to generate a business opportunity.

In contrast to advertising techniques such as ads, banners or commercials, the content of content marketing does not focus on the positive representation of one’s own company with its products but offers useful information, advanced knowledge or entertainment. Content marketing is based on trade press, consulting and entertainment publications in terms of approach and topic. Content marketing achieves its goals by profiling the content producer as an expert, consultant, and entertainer who demonstrates competencies, know-how, and value propositions through the content, rather than just asserting them.

Content marketing is part of strategic marketing. It focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, and ultimately generate profitable customer action. Content marketing can constitute unfair competition. Services paid for by the marketing operator are to be classified as surreptitious advertising if they appear unlabeled on third-party websites. Content in the sense of content marketing can be e.g. texts, images, videos, podcasts or (info) graphics.

Content marketing content can be published on company websites, own blogs, own mobile apps, social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, platforms for user-generated content such as YouTube, Pinterest or Flickr or via classic public relations and online PR. Other forms of publication are e-books, white papers, (online) presentations, newsletters and microsites, for example, based on cooperation with editorial offers.

Content marketing is also used as a search engine and inbound marketing technique. In search engine marketing, content interspersed with the appropriate keywords makes websites findable. In addition, appealing content as a link bait can lead to visitors linking to it. Inbound marketing uses content for lead generation and only makes it available after providing individual contact data.

Content seeding refers to the distribution of content on the Internet to create links, so-called backlinks, to one’s content. The aim is that the content is rated as relevant for search engines and thus receives a better placement. The individual disciplines of content marketing include editing, search engine optimisation (SEO), search engine advertising (SEA), native advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and influencer marketing.