What is content marketing and its details?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Instead of pitching products or services, a strategic content-driven approach provides relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve issues in their work (B2B content) or personal lives (B2C content).
Effective use of this approach requires a documented strategy. Building one doesn’t have to be complicated..
It focuses on solving problems and answering questions. Not necessarily directly selling products or services.
Common types of content include:
- Blog posts
- Videos
- Podcast episodes
- Infographics
- Ebooks
- Newsletters
- Social media posts
- Webinars
Key benefits of content marketing include:
- Higher search engine rankings: Publishing and updating website content that’s created with search engines in mind can help you appear prominently in search results
- Increased organic traffic: Having your content appear prominently in search results often leads to more website visits
- Enhanced customer loyalty: Providing content that your audience finds valuable can foster trust and loyalty
- Increased conversion rates: engaging content can convert visitors into loyal customers
How does content marketing work?
Once you’ve decided on the types of content marketing your business will create, it’s time to build a content marketing strategy. The purpose of content marketing is to deepen relationships and solve problems, so every content marketing strategy should address the three stages of content marketing.
1. Awareness
The awareness stage is the first step of every customer journey. This is when customers become aware of an issue or a problem they have. At this stage, content marketing should focus on customer needs and pain points without overly promoting your solutions or products. The best types of content for the awareness stage include blogs answering common questions with an FAQ, informative how-to videos, or high-level eBooks.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, your audience knows they have a problem and begins looking for solutions. Businesses should still deliver value with their content marketing at this stage, but they can now add a few well-placed promotions within the content. The best types of content for this stage include helpful infographics and how-to blogs.
3. Decision
In the decision stage, your audience decides whether they’re going to choose your solution or not. This is the stage when your content marketing should lean more heavily into sales-related content. Content like comparison lists, customer testimonials, product demo videos, and buyer guides do well at this stage. Businesses can also use retargeted paid ads to bring lost leads back into the fold.
What is content management personalization?
The goal of personalization in marketing is to offer the right content to the right people at the right time. This requires customer data, marketing workflow management, and automation. High-tech organizations may use several types of data to personalize their customer experience:
- Persona, job title, and industry
- User preference centers, purchase histories, and search histories
- Local events and regional trends
- Gender, age, and other demographics
Content can be developed to meet the needs of different personas within the audience. A security solutions provider might offer an article on endpoint security to an IT director when they’re researching upcoming network security conferences. Likewise, a gaming console company might share an article about upcoming local gaming events with customers in a specific region.
How to do content marketing
1. Know who your customers are
Companies need to make sure they understand their audience and know how to engage with them. Customer segmentation Follow companies to build detailed views of their customers with buyer personas.
These personas not only help the company understand its customers but also identify the types of content that will best resonate with different customer segments.
By activating and acting on these personas, a company can successfully communicate with its audience, build trust, and find new customers.
2. Figure out what information they’ll need
The next step is to determine what information is necessary to connect customers with your product, brand, or service.
Identify your audience’s pain points so you better understand their priorities, challenges, and preferences. From there, your content marketing strategy should answer common questions and solve your audience’s problems.
The better your content solves a problem, the more likely your audience is to engage with you.
3. Decide how to deliver that information
Once you know your customer and what they need, you’ll need to deliver content via the best medium for your target audience. For example, if your customer personas reveal that your ideal buyers spend a lot of time on Facebook, it means you should deliver content on that platform.
By going where your audience spends their time online, you can ensure they see your content and engage with your brand.
4. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for success
Content marketing is effective, but attribution isn’t always simple. Businesses should establish content marketing KPIs to help them understand how their content is performing.
However, the KPIs you choose will depend on your goals. Some businesses track content engagement, like views and comments, while others look for conversions.
The key is to set measurable, realistic KPIs for your business.
5. Create engaging content
You need to create professional content that entertains and informs your audience. Follow these tips to create better content:
- Create clear, well-written content that doesn’t rely on jargon.
- Deliver value to your audience, whether in the form of actionable tips, discounts, or insider information.
- Create different pieces of content for customers at different stages of the funnel.
- Ensure your content works with the channel you’re using. You can reuse the same ideas in a blog for social media, but you might have to adjust it to communicate better with users on a different platform.
6. Set a schedule
Your business needs to release content on a consistent basis to attract both regular traffic and search engine crawlers. Creating a posting schedule can help you release content regularly, but be realistic. It’s easy to be overly ambitious, so start with one blog post or video a week.
7. Set a budget
While content marketing is one of the most affordable forms of marketing, it isn’t free. Businesses should always set a budget for their content marketing initiatives so they can measure return on investment (ROI). Create a budget for hiring freelancers, buying content tools, and running paid ads to control your spending.
8. Analyze and measure results
Make sure you regularly sit down with your marketing team to review how your content marketing efforts stack up against your target KPIs. Analyzing and measuring your performance can help you understand which pieces perform better, which can ultimately help you create stronger content. It also allows marketers to shift their budget toward more successful types of content .
Key elements of a content marketing strategy
When creating a content marketing strategy for your brand, consider your target audience and the touchpoints to engage with them. These are the four main elements of a content marketing strategy: brand positioning, value proposition, measuring ROI, and developing a plan.
1. Position your brand.
First, define your brand, values, and positioning. If you are selling chocolate, are you an artisanal chocolate bar that sources its beans from South America, or are you marketing Amul candies? Whilst a chocolate lover may purchase both, the two types of brands appeal to different consumers.
Consider demographics and location when positioning your brand, thinking about your competitors to strategise delivering a unique brand experience.
2. Identify your value.
Once you have defined your brand and positioning, you can identify what value to deliver with specific types of content. You can sustain relationships with customers through channels, such as emails or social media presence when they follow your brand for recipe tips, aspirational lifestyle photos, links to life hack blogs, and more. Your content offering should make sense for your brand and convert into sales.
3. Consider your return on investment (ROI).
With your positioning and value in mind, create a compelling case for the content to drive your business forward. Avoid wasting time and resources to produce content that does not help your organisation achieve its goals. Develop a business case that assesses your content strategy’s benefits, risks, and budget. Your organisation must be convinced that implementing this strategy has a high ROI.
4. Define your plan.
After estimating the potential ROI, you can create a plan that addresses how, when, and where (consider channels and mediums, as well as regions) you’ll implement your strategy. Your plan should align with your business goals and integrate any other marketing and sales plans. With these four parts in mind, you can create a solid content marketing strategy to propel your business forwards.