What Bill Gates predicted in his essay “Content is the King”, stating that the internet will revolutionize the way people get information and the way they communicate, is becoming a reality in the modern world. Obviously, this affects the business world as well. No longer can we imagine a marketing campaign without online marketing. Online promotion has become dominant, sometimes even an exclusive way for businesses to reach consumers.
This is where content has found its main purpose. Content marketing is the core of other online marketing strategies, such as SEM, affiliate marketing, email marketing, etc.
The first section of the course focuses on this role content has nowadays, it explains what content marketing is and how to start with it. Furthermore, you need to learn more about content types, which are also discussed in one of the chapters along with types of blog posts.
Then follows the central part of the course which focuses on the four phases of content marketing: content creation, content optimization, content management and content distribution.
It all starts with an idea and the creation process that goes through phases before you completely create a piece of content based on this idea. The following step is content optimization, as the best way to ensure that your content is created based on specific standards that increase its visibility and thus its potential to reach online users.
Content management is the segment about content management systems, and how they help you make your content available on the internet. Finally, the section focused on content distribution is what is going to wrap up this segment with ideas and suggestions on how to promote your content.
You will then explore metrics as a necessary segment for website monitoring and performance analysis.
Content marketing strategy occupies a prominent place in this course as well, because it represents a sort of a roadmap to help you define what you need to create content, how to create it, how to distribute it, and finally, how to evaluate its performance. Common challenges that might occur along the way are also discussed in one of the chapters.
Since content marketing cannot run independently, you need to explore its role in online marketing. You might also need to learn more about online marketing to get better at content marketing. It is all connected and mutually conditioned, which you will explore in this segment. The topic of influencer marketing is also discussed as an increasingly popular strategy in online marketing.
In the end, you will see the list of helpful tools which can help you along the four phases of content marketing.
The ultimate goal is to make this guide a starting point in understanding content marketing as something more than just the process of writing an article or recording a video. Content has a specific purpose, and content marketing activities are designed to help you achieve this purpose. Learning more about online marketing will help you implement content marketing in many different strategies, such as in email marketing, in affiliate marketing, social media marketing, etc.
