The Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing
?"Content is king," they say. "Content is everything," even. These days, content is one of the best ways to raise brand awareness among a targeted audience. Content marketing campaigns can also bring you online authority, web traffic, leads, and sales. Unlike traditional advertising which interrupts customers to get noticed, content marketing provides content that customers want in exchange for permission to market a product or service.?
But it isn’t just about churning out piece after piece of content. You need to know the basics that make content marketing work and the best practices that will set you apart from the competition. And then you have to learn how to create and promote awesome, useful, informative, educational, and inspirational content that will reach your audience at the right time. We created this guide to be an easy-to-digest and reliable reference for all aspects of content marketing, whether you're just getting started or are part of an expert team that's simply looking to review its fundamentals. From finding the right team and coming up with ideas that'll resonate with your audience to successfully promoting your content and scaling your content efforts up over time, we aimed to create a holistic look at the field of content marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the proven practice of generating interest in a business and its products/services by creating value for customers through engaging and informative content. Unlike other types of sales and marketing, content marketing makes people come to you rather than you reaching out to them (though there is some overlap between the two). That’s why content marketing is part of inbound marketing. Content marketers create, curate, share, and distribute quality content. As you’ll see, quality content is content that is relevant, accurate, optimized for search and delivers what your audience wants.
This content helps marketers attract a defined target audience, inform them about the business, engage and educate them, generate leads and sales, and turn that audience into customers, fans, and advocates.
Content isn't 'stuff we write to rank higher' or 'infographics' or 'long-form articles.' Content is anything that communicates a message to the audience. Anything.
— Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent, Inc.
Why Is Content Marketing Essential?
One of the reasons some companies have hesitated to allocate resources to content marketing is that it can be difficult to really understand the benefits of content marketing. Getting people to think more highly of your business certainly sounds great, but the results are quite nebulous.
According to Statista , around the world, the digital population is about 4 billion people. That means about half of the world is connected, which is a pretty big market. The best way to reach people who are always online is with content that comes straight to the mobile devices and social networks they are using. After all, that’s where they’re looking for information. That’s why content is such a popular marketing tool. The latest stats from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) show that 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers consider content marketing a core strategy.
Through the years, businesses have seen the huge impact of content marketing as a part of their marketing strategies. Here are some steps to create and implement a well-thought-out content marketing strategy for your business.
Steps To Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Creating content without a plan is like driving without GPS: you may get there in the end, but you’ll definitely take a few wrong turns on the way. In fact, you could end up wandering around aimlessly, getting frustrated, and wasting time and money.
Set Goals
One of the first steps is to work out your content marketing mission. It’s a brief statement of who your audience is, how you’ll reach them, and what they’ll gain from your content. Business goals are an important part of the process. They set out what your business will gain from content marketing. Typical content marketing goals include improving sales, getting more leads, and increasing traffic.
Your content strategy will depend on what your content marketing goals are. You’ll have a clear idea of what you need to do when you study your marketing brief thoroughly. Ask yourself these questions:
Identify Yous Buyers’ Persona
An essential step in any content strategy is knowing who you’re marketing to. This will help you target your content appropriately. This is important because marketing works best when it’s relevant. If you create content for everyone, you’re not creating it for anyone. A starting point is getting demographic data via Google Analytics, as well as analytics from social media and email. These will help you understand their priorities, decide where to reach them and help you create target-specific content.
You can use these platforms to identify their demographics, job, pain points, and buying behavior, among others, map out the buyer’s journey—from the awareness to conversion stage,? put yourself in their shoes and create content that offers the right amount and type of information they need to know about your product or service in every step of the way.
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Audit Your Existing Content
To sustain production of compelling content, you need to look at the current status of your content marketing. In this manner, you can see which of your content performs the best or otherwise. You can also use existing content performance as inspiration for future content.
Content auditing may also mean examining your blog in various aspects: design, layout, format, nature of content, authors, and target of content. Use your metrics, such as pageviews and shares to help you analyze your existing content. From these insights, you can develop with sound recommendations and implement the necessary changes moving forward.
Stay Up-To-Date With The Market Trends
For every business, there’s a set of competitors. You can observe your competitors’ blogs and see what types of content they produce and how they perform. Not only can you learn about new tactics to adopt, this will also allow you to distinguish your brand and stand out from competition.
Aside from doing an analysis of your blog, you should also do the same when it comes to your competitors. You can do a competitor analysis on the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Then look for the top global content for those keywords and analyze the factors that make it perform well.
Promote Your Content The Right Way
After generating your topics, you should think about where you want to share these content assets. You can utilize social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. You should also make use of email newsletters to distribute your content. These are the people who are already listening, so make sure you’ve got something to say to them.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social networks can help improve content visibility. That’s why you can’t ignore it as a core element of content marketing. Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm content ideas that will interest your target audience. Make sure you post regularly and offer truly valuable information that your ideal customers will find helpful and interesting. The content that you share on your social networks can include social media images, videos, infographics, how-to guides and more.
EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to market with content. Most people still read emails so it’s a great way to keep in touch with subscribers and customers to build a relationship with them. Plus email marketing is proven to earn around $40 for every dollar you spend. That’s why it’s a content marketing must.?
Measure, Adjust Strategy, And Repeat
What a lot of people forget after implementing content marketing is tracking the performance of their content. You can formulate your own frequency for performance reports—whether weekly or monthly—depending on the goals you’ve established early on.
The key metrics to track and measure are those for conversion, brand interest, blog traffic, social media shares, and built links. They will tell you if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re not, or if you need to adjust specific elements in your strategy. Continuous optimizations and improvements will eventually lead you to a powerful, customized content strategy that works specifically for your brand.
Conclusion
Content marketing can help you attract leads, win more sales, and grow your business. But it isn’t just about churning out piece after piece of content. You need to know the basics that make content marketing work and the best practices that will set you apart from the competition.
Content is the foundation of just about every type of online customer interaction. From search and discovery through consideration and on to conversion, content helps consumers make decisions. Content marketing helps brands maximize their return on investment in content by ensuring that each content asset—whether a blog post, email, article, infographic, video, or any other format—reaches the most receptive and relevant audience.