Introduction

Sharing online content is a key part of consumers' modern life. All over the world, people send news and interesting articles, share YouTube videos, and read and forward reviews of hotels or restaurants to their family and friends. This social transmission of content and information has an effect on consumers and brands. Consumer-to-consumer interactions in online and offline environments have an effect on attitudes, preferences and eventually buying behavior of people.

With the advancements of technology, marketing has incorporated the interactivity provided by technology to create two-way communication channels with current and potential customers. Using internet-based technology, marketing encourages the active participation of consumers. Jutkowitz points out that we are on the verge of transformation for brands and organizations because of content, because nine out of ten companies are using content marketing to engage, interact, convert, and remind consumers of its products and brands.

Content marketing goes beyond selling and traditional marketing campaign and it focuses on providing consumers with value in the form of relevant information and ideas, using publication or syndication of text, images, videos and other content forms. Therefore, content marketing is changing the way companies sell and communicate with its target audience.

In online environments, an organization cannot focus on a push marketing strategy, and should direct its effort on a pull marketing strategy because it would invite more interactions and participations with consumers. To this end, content marketing can provide a valuable avenue for any company that also has an online presence.

However, as a starting point content includes the text that forms webpages, as well as the rich media content, such as videos, podcasts, user-generated content and interactive product selectors. Digital content marketing was defined by Pulizzi and Barrett's as "the creation and distribution of educational and/or compelling content in multiple formats to attract and/or retain customers". Jefferson and Tanton agree that a paradigm change in marketing philosophy is required, and suggest that this change will imply switching from a selling perspective to a helping perspective, which can be achieved using content marketing.

Content marketing has been identified as part of digital inbound marketing, in the quest to "attract potential customers, retain existing once, and transform aspirational consumers in advocates by developing various forms of content that prospects consider valuable and will use the created content in order to access a website to learn more or come into contact with a marketing offer".

Moreover, as indicated by Holliman and Rowley, a considerable proportion of organizations do not allocate resources for content marketing. As the authors describe, there is confusion in comprehending this concept and its importance for this digital marketing strategy. Moreover, Holliman and Rowley emphasize the challenges of operationalizing content marketing because of its complexity.

B2B and B2C marketers are giving content marketing high priority, especially because Google's search engine algorithm updates that focuses on the content of each webpages, considering multiple dimensions of the content, such as relevancy, date of publication, propagation on social media, internal and external links, to name a few.

Therefore, content marketing is of high importance for the development and evolution of marketing, from an academic perspective, and for its application in online settings to achieve business goals, from a practical perspective.