What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is creating valuable content that attracts an audience to your eCommerce business. The content itself can take many forms, such as podcasts, web pages, blogs, videos, newsletters, and other media to be consumed and shared. 

Your business model and products determine the content to create. Ask yourself, “What is the best content marketing platform?” Informational or entertaining? Visual or written? The central aim of content marketing is to add value to your audience, which, in turn, brings more business to you.

Content marketing is creating valuable content that attracts an audience to your eCommerce business. The content itself can take many forms, such as podcasts, web pages, blogs, videos, newsletters, and other media to be consumed and shared. 

Your business model and products determine the content to create. Ask yourself, “What is the best content marketing platform?” Informational or entertaining? Visual or written? The central aim of content marketing is to add value to your audience, which, in turn, brings more business to you.

Awareness and research inform buyer consideration when purchasing a new product, so producing content that educates an audience about a product will encourage them to make a purchase. Our white paper delves into how research is becoming more and more important for shopper and how your business can address their needs.

What makes content marketing so powerful is the organic response it generates. Plus, it naturally supports other marketing methods, too. For instance, writing a blog post will also boost SEO, and the post serves as additional content for social media posts.

You may have heard the term inbound marketing, which is a methodology that attracts an audience to your products. Content marketing is an inbound marketing strategy to do just that. Other strategies include social media, SEO, and branding. 

Inbound marketing is different from traditional advertising, which is typically an interruption to the viewer, whether on a web page, on a billboard, or in print. While old-school ads have benefits, viewers are becoming more adept at ignoring this advertising style. Inbound eCommerce marketing brings viewers to your site because your business’s content is beneficial. 

For example, the famous room-share and rental platform Airbnb launched Airbnb Magazine in 2017. The publication provides travel itineraries, investigates location-focused feature stories, gives travel tips, and highlights unique homes and rentals on their platform. Today, Airbnb is not just a product, but also a source of travel information.

Publishing a magazine is a big-budget example of inbound marketing. A similar outcome is achievable on a smaller scale, with quality blog writing, fun smartphone videos, and other inventive content creation. And it doesn’t have to cost as much as a front-page ad. 

For instance, take Ghost Tequila, a liquor company out of Boston. Due to a large amount of restaurant and beverage industry shutdowns from the pandemic, the company created an online challenge. They paid bartenders to submit a cocktail recipe using Ghost Tequila and then asked viewers to vote for the best recipe through their website. The company donated $1 per vote to the Restaurant Association for the Restaurant Workers COVID Relief fund. They also matched donations on a GoFundMe page. The bartenders who participated in the challenge all shared tutorials of their cocktails through their personal online profiles, which resulted in over 1 million views. This strategy took the time and effort of video production off Ghost’s shoulders, and the brand raised over $30 thousand for a good cause. 

So here is a successful example of how creative thinking—a cocktail recipe challenge—brought value to Ghost Tequila’s audience and rewarded the company itself tenfold. 

Quality content marketing doesn’t have to be this elaborate. A simple infographic can be an effective tool, and even an informational graph can draw people to your website. Just always remember the main goal: add value. 

This blog post is a primer to the question, “what is content marketing?” But there is much more to learn. Contact Boxwood Digital and learn how our team can add value with quality content creation for your customers.