If you’re reading this, you probably use WordPress to power your website. Your in the right place! In this article we’ll look at a short introduction to content marketing, specifically for WordPress websites.
Content marketing isn’t a new concept. In fact, content marketing has its origins in the late 1800’s. John Deere was one of the first business owners to realise that successfully sharing relevant and valuable content to potential customers could acquire and engage the very customers he was seeking. The magazine he launched titled The Furrow, is still in circulation today reaching 1.5 million readers in 40 countries.
However, the term Content Marketing didn’t really come into its own until the mid to late 1990’s with the advent of the internet and subsequently social media. If you’re new to this, let’s get you up to speed in this article.
What is content marketing?
At its most straightforward, content marketing can be defined as:
Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
Sounds pretty easy, right? Well, yes. If you’re a major multi-national corporation with an extensive marketing department and millions of dollars to throw at producing good content. But what about the rest of us?
Your WordPress blog is the key to your content marketing
It’s safe to say that these days most small to medium businesses have their own website and along with this a blog. Some companies might call it ‘news’, doesn’t matter what it’s called it can be the centrepiece of your content marketing efforts.
Using your blog it’s easy to regularly publish material on your website. You can then use other tools to get that content in front of your audience. You might use something like MailChimp for example to then put together an eMail newsletter. Linking back to each of the items you’ve already published on your blog. With a bit of know-how you can even automate the publishing of a regular newsletter with tools like MailChimp and WordPress.
SEO benefits of regular content updates
As well as keeping your business top of mind with your audience, regularly publishing new material on your website has significant affect on your site’s SEO ranking (Search Engine Optimisation). Read our article Fresh website content will lead to success for your WordPress site to learn more about this.
Getting Social?
If you’re already using social media or planning to get started, again WordPress is a key tool in your strategy. Often you’ll want to link users on your social networks back to longer forms of your content. By first publishing these as blogs or news stories you can then easily link back to these when using various social media channels.
Further reading
Check out some of these articles to dig a little deeper: