Content Marketing’s effect on customer engagement

Sammanfattning: The marketing landscape is changing, with the focus shifting from traditional marketing methods towards digital marketing. Enterprises must realize the importance of this new paradigm to not risk falling behind competitors. The new paradigm focuses on customer relationships and trying to attract and create loyal customers. A new way of creating loyal trusting customer relationships is by using content marketing, meaning providing customers with valuable information in the form of content and enabling two-way communication. To understand how consumers perceive content and why they choose to engage or not, is crucial for enterprises, in creating successful content marketing.This study aims to provide knowledge and understanding of how content marketing affects customer engagement from a consumer's perspective. This study is a qualitative study using several semi-structured interviews and observations to gather data. A conceptual framework from previous research is used to analyse the result, this framework is a multidimensional approach of how consumers react and perceive different types of online content marketing.The outcome of this study shows that consumer engagement is a psychological state that is hard to reach for any enterprise/brand, to be truly successful the consumers dimensions of cognitive, emotional and action response must all be affected, which can be enabled through credible, targeted and differentiated content marketing.