“Content marketing is a marketing program that centers on creating, publishing, and distributing content for your target audience — usually online — the goal of which is to attract new customers.” Corey Wainwright of Hubspot
In terms of the classic sales funnel, content marketing would fall under the attract heading. The goal of content marketing is to be at the ready when your potential clients want to locate information that is on topic with your services or industry. By having a website rich with quality content answering those yet to be asked questions is a simple way to generate leads. 
Very recently, we here at Media Venue in Louisville, Ky received a call from a business in California and they asked for a digital advertising proposal for their niche business. Our digital director was even a bit surprised that the lead was generated due to a blog post he had written about 3 years previously. We know first hand that once information is on the internet it truly is like a 24/7 sales representative.
Now digital marketing has been in full swing for quite some time, but every so often a certain search engine stirs things up by resetting the information they base their rankings on. Most recently they have taken into account social media postings. Many different styles and platforms of social media exist. As a company making sure you have fresh content across these multiple platforms is an affordable way to increase search engine rankings and offer an authoritative point of view.
Content Marketing can do more than generate leads and increase search engine rankings though. It is also a fantastic tool to generate email lists for a newsletter or sales email. Rich content will also gain a company valuable followers and subscribers who share and endorse their message, product or service. Overall it will also increase brand awareness for any company or organization.
Before you think it is too good to be true like all things content marketing does have a few cons. I say a few because there really are not many. The two that come to mind are that content writing can take a large amount of man power, and the results are not instantaneous. The internet is vast but as long as the content pieces are effectively written and tagged with applicable keywords they will be working for you like that 24/7 sales guy you wish you had.
Written by: Holly Dunbar, Social Media Manager Media Venue
Sources:
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing-strategy-guide
