Many marketers are still coming around to the idea of content marketing and how it positively impacts both consumer preference, conversion and search engine optimization. To provide some illumination on the concept of content marketing as well as some simple context, let’s look at a practical example of how content marketing works.

I was recently asked by the University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL) to deliver a webinar to some start-up ventures associated with its incubator.  The subject matter of the webinar includes marketing, web design, and Internet strategy.  The audience of the webinar is to be comprised of small business owners, marketers and technology executives.

I don’t conduct webinars very frequently, so I had a couple of questions about the best practices of duration, platform, and otherwise.  But one of the most pressing questions on my mind was *when* to conduct the webinar.  I was curious about the best days of the week and time of day to conduct a webinar to maximize attendance.  Like most people, I went to Google for an answer.

I typed  ’what is the best time to schedule a webinar?’ into Google.  There, on the first page of search results, was a blog post from AccuConference, a company that helps people like me conduct Webinars:

The first page of results for the query ‘ what is the best time to schedule a webinar?’

When I clicked on the link, I was taken to a well-constructed page (see below) from the company which contained its expert opinion on what days and times tend to work best for business people to attend webinars.  The page is clean, simple, and contains the right keywords in some of the right places.  And, most importantly to the company, I was introduced to the company’s products–software and services to help people conduct online meetings and webinars.

A well-constructed blog post that ranks on the first page of Google search results for a highly relevant search query.

We can learn a great deal from this example, but here are a few of the more important take-aways about content marketing:

• Blogging is not a waste of time!  This company has likely invested a great deal of time in creating relevant content to reach their customers.
• Content marketing meets people where they’re at and when they’re there.  If this company would have sent me a spam e-mail message months ago (when I wasn’t particularly interested in webinars), the marketing message would have never reached me.  Instead, this approach caters to a captive audience.  People who look for things on Google want them now, not later.
• A great place to start with content marketing is anticipating the questions your audience might be asking when they need your product.  This is not an exact science, but you can certainly brainstorm, talk to customers, and look to your analytics results for clarity.

In a world where we’re increasingly bombarded by more marketing messages than we can handle, seek not to become a part of that fray but to use content marketing to reach your customers at the exact moment they need you.