It seems that everyone is talking about content and content marketing. Here’s my take on what these terms mean and how you can use them to leverage your business.

What is Content?

Let’s start with defining content…

Content is the words and images that you’re reading right now.

In books, it’s the action between the covers.

In a newspaper or magazine it’s both the articles and the ads – they’re just positioned to achieve different outcomes. One is designed to inform, the other to sell.

Content Creation

Previously, through mass media such as newspapers or magazines, we mostly read other people’s content. And, the people who created content were professionals such as journalists, radio show hosts, photographers or TV stars.

Now we can all do it! We can create our own content and publish it on our websites and through social media.

Content today is anything you upload to your website or any other website. It could be text, an image, a photo, a video, an audio file or a slideshow.

This includes both the usual content on your website that doesn’t change a lot, like the ‘About Us’ or ‘Services’ page. And, it includes the content you might update and change regularly, like your blog posts. It even includes your status updates on Facebook.

Content Marketing

This big shift in access to media has sparked a whole new need to create content. Previously, it might have just been fun to create a video.

Now, it’s big business and it forms a new kind of marketing called ‘Content Marketing’.

Content Marketing is the deliberate use of content to attract customers.

Creating content, such as writing blog posts or creating video is the building block of the new marketing: Content Marketing.

And it starts with defining who you want to attract. Then you can decide what type of ideas, information and content that would appeal to this audience. And, in what format – words, images, video – they want to engage with your information.