Tools of Digital Marketing: Content Marketing

The words “content marketing” and “digital marketing” appear together so often no one would blame you for thinking they’re interchangeable. That’s because content marketing is a type of digital marketing. To decide if content marketing is the right strategy to promote your creative brand or business, it’s important to understand what it is, how it works, and why it’s an appealing strategy.

Digital Marketing Components

Digital marketing is the broad label for all your online marketing tools. Your digital marketing strategy is your plan for which tools to use and how to make them work together to achieve your goals. The major components of digital marketing include:

• Affiliate marketing

• Content marketing

• Email marketing

• Influencer marketing

• Online advertising

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Social media marketing

So What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is an organic strategy focused on attracting your target audience using high-quality, relevant written, visual, or video content. This includes articles, white papers, and case studies. You can publish this content on your website, blog, or social media channels.

Effective content prioritizes your audience over your brand. By consistently providing value to your audience with no strings attached, you develop a fanbase built on trust and loyalty. Not only do fans convert to customers, but they also share your content with their own audiences.

It’s like offering unlimited free samples of a meal. Some people will take a bite and move on. Most will linger and come back for seconds and thirds. Your samples are good and they take the edge off. And since it’s unlimited, they’ll happily tell their friends to come over and try it, too. After a while, the snackers decide they’re hungry enough that a sample just won’t cut it and they want the whole meal.

A content marketing strategy doesn’t convince people they are hungry. It gives them a reason to say. “I could eat anywhere, but I want to eat here.”

How Does It Help Promote Your Brand?

Part of what makes content marketing an appealing tool for entrepreneurs is it doesn’t require a budget. You can use money to achieve some short-term results faster. However, an effective content marketing strategy is a long-term effort that inspires your audience to promote your brand simply because they like your content and they like you.

This is why guides on creating a content strategy talk so much about providing value and being relatable to your audience. To make it work, you need more than good snacks. You have to show up in a way that people want to hang around you and chat every time they grab a bite. The people who keep coming back for free samples but don’t want to engage with you are unlikely to buy the whole meal.

What Does This Mean for Creatives?

How do you make content that provides value if you’re a creative? What does that look like for writers, visual artists, and filmmakers? You have more options than just sharing finished works, excerpts, clips, and highlight reels.

Whichever platform you choose for your content strategy, think of it like a digital sketchbook or creative journal. What would be inside?

Things that inspire you

• Travel photos

• Books, shows, movies, comics, art, etc.

• Other creatives

• Random things you see or experience that spark your creative thinking

Your creative skills in action

• Sketches, rough drafts, raw photos, first takes

• Experiments

• Finishing touches

• How you have fun with your creativity

Things you learn from

• Other creatives

• Mistakes

• Things that didn’t work out

• Things that worked out better than expected