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Content Marketing

Content Marketing is the practice of creating and freely sharing useful and informative content to engage potential customers and make them more aware of products, services and company characteristics as well as to build a relationship between the company and the potential customer receiving the content. Content marketing is defined by Wikipedia and by CopyBlogger as the following respectively:

Content marketing is a marketing format that involves the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.

Content Marketing means creating and freely sharing informative content as a means of converting prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers. The primary goal is to obtain opt-in permission to deliver content via email or other medium over time. Repeated and regular exposure builds a relevant relationship that provides multiple opportunities for conversion, rather than a “one-shot” all-or-nothing sales approach.

How does Content Marketing work? Content marketing uses high quality visual-based media to expose potential customers to what a company has to offer.

But what does that really mean? According to a recent Ezine article on effective content marketing techniques, content marketing is not about telling customers about your company, but about “filling your website with useful information related to the services you provide: white papers, mobile applications, online articles, recipes, web tools and webinars. Basically, content anything your prospects would find interesting.” The Betty Crocker website is one great content marketing example. On the site you'll find:

• A recipe for easy beef tacos.
• Tips for money-saving packed lunches.
• A "How do you like your s'mores?" poll.
• Community message boards.
• Not a word about how Betty Crocker cake mixes are "moist and delicious" in sight.

In other words, this is one of many brands who have realized providing useful content is a better marketing strategy than talking about themselves. – Ezine artile by Marketing expert Megan Tsai

It can be difficult to measure the effectiveness of content marketing; however it is definitely not impossible. The Content Marketing Institute offers some nice articles (and some very in depth articles) on measuring the effects of content marketing (url below). Below are questions that can be answered to judge the effectiveness of a content marketing campaign:
1. How many purchases did the content marketing drive? Remember, it’s important to have a call-to-action and links to appropriate product pages to make this easier to monitor.
2. What is the average order size, both in terms of the number of products and dollar amount?
3. What are the revenues per reader?
4. What is the conversion rate? How many of the people who took some of the actions earlier in the process actually bought? This can be a measure of how effective the other aspects of your marketing and purchase process are.

www.copyblogger.com/content-marketing/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing

ezinearticles.com/?Content-Marketing-Examples---Website-Content-Examples-For-More-Effective-Marketing&id=3721886

www.contentmarketinginstitute.com/2010/12/content-marketing-prove-it/