At first glance content marketing seems just like it sounds, marketing content related to your brand. If you dig further you will find out it is much more than that, it is an art really and growing rapidly as a popular trend in the marketing industry. The link at the bottom of this blog will take you to the Hootsuite University site to a video that discusses content marketing with Hootsuite and LinkedIn. Taking the time to view the video will be quite valuable to future marketers since there is evidence that 79% of marketers report their organizations are shifting into branded content.
Content marketing is defined by Hootsuite as creating and sharing free content to attract prospective buyers and provide valuable information to convert them into customers. The idea behind content marketing is that the valuable information will relate to the company’s mission and educate the buyers and sellers in order to create trust between the two. Essentially, content marketing provides sales collateral that others can share as social proof. Rule of thumb states that if someone you know and trust shares content you are more likely to buy what the content is selling.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google Plus are the most popular social media platforms to distribute content marketing. The video speaks specifically to the success content marketers have on LinkedIn and the different ways you can use LinkedIn for content marketing which are listed as the following:
- Company Pages
- Sponsored Updates
- Content Advertising
- Slide Share Channels
You can learn more about each of these tools by watching the video. The video is also interesting because Hootsuite uses real life examples of successful content marketing campaigns including its own. I appreciate their transparency in their mission and purpose of the campaign and how they divulge into the details of their strategy. I believe sharing is caring and it’s a great learning device to help others as they aim to do. I feel content marketing is overlooked in our curriculum because it is utilized through social media. I think that we can learn further about how to embed our key messages into the content we share by viewing case studies of successful content marketing campaigns like Hootsuite does.
To find out more, check out the link below:
https://learn.hootsuite.com/student.php?ctg=content&view_unit=182
Michelle Candusso 