As a business or personal brand you can essentially become a publisher. One that creates and distributes its own content...and owns said content. The great thing about content - good content - is that you can create it to create or nurture an audience.
Take Red Bull for example. Rather than focus on creating advertising campaigns to promote their core product, they instead focus their efforts on creating content based on activities their customers love. Red Bull understand their customers and their marketing strategy is overtaken, overwhelmingly mind you, by taking a truly customer centric approach to how they position themselves in the market.
Take a look at this video produced by Red Bull. Featuring highlights from Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall, the video has been viewed over 43.2 million times. The YouTube Channel itself has almost 7 million subscribers.
Looking at their Facebook page, they have in excess of 49 million likes and their Instagram has 8.3 million followers. What's interesting is this hugely successful company is a drink brand and yet a tiny segment of their marketing actually actively advertises the product.
Of course, Red Bull has very big marketing budgets. But you don’t need a huge budget to in order to produce your own content. You can produce a range of content that your customers and potential customers will be interested in:
The important thing to remember with content marketing is that it takes time and consistency. You need time to produce the content and time to grow a following. You need consistency in the content and consistency in your delivery.