What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing approach that focuses on creating and sharing of relevant content online to enhance branding, engage audiences and generate leads, and other related marketing activities.

Content is the present – and future – of marketing

Content is the key element for any kind of marketing regardless of the marketing methods you follow and adapt. Proper and relevant content is the main part of any type of marketing

Social media marketing – Content marketing strategy is more important than setting up a social media strategy.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization helps to drive traffic for business websites that have quality content

Inbound marketing – this works effectively to drive inbound traffic only with effective contents

Pay Per Click – this works only when there is content behind it.

 STEPS INVOLVED IN CONTENT MARKETING

Set your business objectives

The main business objective is to know what your potential audience would benefit from your content marketing approach and what your business will get in return.

The following are the factors to consider for content marketing

  • Understand your target audience
  • The type of content required to reach the potential audience
  • What will the potential audience benefit through the content

The goal of an effective content marketing strategy should benefit the target audience while it should also benefit your business in return.

Enhances revenue – through a content marketing approach

Gains more website traffic as it will create more opportunities for your business to meet the goals

Gains highly potential leads and therefore helps in making a high number of sales to generate more revenue.

Ensure SEO success – helps to get more website traffic

Reduction in marketing costs – with effective and relevant content, you need not invest in other business marketing activities.

Engage in social media activities – This helps in driving traffic and gain authority

Create Your KPIs

Setting Key Performance Indicators for your content marketing approach helps to achieve measurable and specific goals for your business. These indicators would help you track the business performance based on the metrics. This includes the goals to achieve sales, SEO, traffic, revenue, traffic and other digital marketing activities like social media and email marketing metrics.

KPIs helps to

Reach a specific revenue target within a given or expected time span (a year or a quarter or a month)

Understand the number of sign-ups that you are getting and work on it to improve the number of quality leads

Check the new email subscribers

Check the performance of site traffic and

Enhance the search ranking of your web pages to help improve traffic

It is also important to keep a track on the funds invested in marketing by checking on the finances spent on various campaigns.

Know Your Audience

To establish a successful marketing strategy – you should know who your audience is? where they are from? And what are their interests – This will help you create the right set of content to reach the right set of audience.

Demographic data

Gather demographic data about your visitors, social media followers, and email subscribers by implementing social media analytics, web analytics, and email subscriber analytics. This will provide you the following data on your audience

  • Gender
  • Age
  • Education
  • Income

You will be able to get information on the key interests by using Google analytics.

 Get Feedback from customers

Gathering feedback from existing customers would help you understand

  • Their thoughts on your current content
  • What are their urgent requirements
  • How can your content address their issues?

Customers’ feedback can help you:

  • Know the users’ priorities
  • Plan on the right place to reach customers

Creating a Buyer’s Persona

Buyer’s persona describes the challenges, pain points and sources of information which will help you understand

  • What type of content the audience is looking at
  • How will the content help them?
  • What will make them care about the content

Perform a content audit to know what your current position is

The content audit can be done by

  • Recording all the contents like guest posts, email campaigns, blog posts, etc
  • Checking on the levels of success
  • Identifying the shortfalls
  • Comparing your content with that of your competitors

Decide on the type of content

There are different types of content that help you channel your marketing strategy to reach the right set of audience.

  • Branded blog posts
  • Company blog post
  • Podcasts
  • Videos
  • Case-studies
  • Infographics
  • Webinars
  • Press releases
  • News
  • Magazine articles
  • Whitepapers
  • Photos
  • Quizzes

 Allocating resources

You should be able to understand who is in charge of creating contents. Some of the content producers are

  • Content writers
  • Experts in creating videos, and podcasts
  • Graphic designers
  • Freelancers

 Content Process

  • Create a content plan
  • Write contents
  • Create required images
  • Make any required changes
  • Upload the content
  • Publish the content

 Content Distribution and Marketing

The most critical part is distribution and marketing. The process involves sharing content on social media, distributing email contents to subscribers.

 

Related Resources:

Why Content Syndication Service by Demand Monster?

What is Content Syndication and how does it help your business?