Look around and it’s easy to see we all live in the era of “content.” Each of us every day reads dozens of pieces of content, and with TikTok and Instagram, seemingly everyone can be a content creator. But for businesses that have not yet ventured into content marketing, it can be daunting if you don’t have a clear understanding of the business case and what it takes to do content creation and deployment successfully. This article should help demystify and make it pretty straightforward.
What is and Why Should a Company Do Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy as it helps businesses attract, engage and retain customers in all phases of the customer journey by distributing content that is valuable to their customers. Content marketing creates brand or product awareness, establishes expertise, and keeps a business or product top of mind when buyers are looking for solutions to their need. Unlike other forms of marketing that are outbound in nature, content marketing is an inbound marketing strategy focused on bringing the customer to you and can be highly measurable. Although content marketing can be much less expensive than outbound marketing, it requires careful research and planning, dedicated resources, and strong execution.
Here are some steps to help you create an effective content marketing strategy and program.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Before you begin writing and designing copy, you should put a content marketing strategy in place where all company stakeholders agree on the approach and goals. Here is a proven process for success:
- Define Who Needs to Be at the Table. Having early discussions about the business objectives that a content strategy will support and the resources it will take is essential. This may mean bringing together a cross-functional group of executives to define the needs, goals, activities, timeframe, and resources for your company’s content marketing effort. This would be a good time to talk about what success should look like and how you will measure it.
- Define Your Specific Goals. Before creating any content, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of what you hope to achieve with your content marketing efforts. Your measurable goals could be to drive traffic to your website, increase conversions, or build brand awareness, among others. Goals should be quantitative so they can be measured (think numerical numbers, percentages, increases) over a specific period of time. A “conversion” is any action you want to happen and will measure. Examples include online event registrations, website content views, leads generated, sales made, or brochures downloaded.
- Know Your Target Audience/s. Understanding your target audience is critical to developing a successful content marketing strategy. Identifying your target audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points will help you create content that resonates with them and drives them toward a desired action. Often these target audience snapshots are developed into customer personas that differentiate your various types of customers.
- Run a Content Audit. Before you can devise a content strategy, it’s not only key to know what your target audience is searching for (relevant content topics to engage your targets at various stages of the buying lifecycle), but it is essential to understand what content you have that can be used or repurposed.
- Conduct a Competitor Analysis. Analyzing your competitors’ content marketing can provide valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. This research can help you identify gaps in your competitors’ strategies that you can exploit and differentiate yourself from the competition.
- Choose Your Channels. Decide which channels you will use to distribute your content. Popular channels include blog or other website content, social media posts, email marketing, videos, and podcasts. Consider which channels are most effective for reaching your target audiences and align with your goals.
- Create a Content Calendar. Plan your content creation and distribution in advance. A content calendar will help you stay organized, ensure consistency in your content creation, and allow you to plan ahead for upcoming events and promotions.
- Choose a Content Management System (CMS). Decide how you will store, access, and disseminate your content with an easy-to-use CMS system. The leading choice is WordPress, but others include HubSpot, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Magento and Magnolia. Top considerations are integration with SEO tools, social media and Google Analytics, as well as security and mobile responsiveness.
- Create High-Quality Content. Content is the backbone of your content marketing strategy, so it’s important to create high-quality content that provides value to your target audiences. Your content should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audiences and not promotional.
- Measure Your Results. Track and measure the success of your content marketing efforts. This will help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy.
Now that you have an effective approach to devising a content marketing strategy or framework, it’s important to develop quality content that will be relevant and resonate with your customers.
Develop Relevant and Visually Compelling Content
Below are tips on developing content that drives business outcomes.
- Identify Your Unique Value Proposition. What sets your brand apart from others in your industry? Your unique value proposition should be at the center of your content marketing strategy.
- Define Your Target Audience for Each Piece of Content. Understanding your target audiences is essential to creating content that resonates with each of them and drives results.
- Diversify Your Content Formats. Experiment with different content formats such as blogs, videos, by-lined articles, podcasts, infographics, email marketing, white papers, guides or checklists, and social media posts to keep your audience engaged.
- Focus on Quality over Quantity. It’s better to produce fewer high-quality pieces of content than a lot of mediocre content.
- Optimize for Search Engines. Ensure that your content is optimized for search engines by using keywords, meta descriptions, and header tags. Keywords are the main words searchers are looking for in an online search, and your content should be the highly relevant answers to their exact questions. You can do your own search and see what the questions / search words are for other users. You also can use a free tool to learn of keywords such as Google Ads Keyword Planner.
- Promote Your Content. Don’t just publish content and hope for the best, actively promote it through social media, email marketing, and other channels including paid digital media such as pay-per-click (PPC).
- Be Visual. Use high-quality, high-resolution photography and on-brand graphic design. Content that is visually appealing and incorporates images is much more likely to be viewed and fully consumed.
- Be Helpful: Content that is not only relevant to various stages of the buyer’s journey but is also helpful improves readership. Include tips, checklists, how-to’s in written, video or graphical formats.
- Use Short-form Video. Well-crafted video can be a very effective content strategy. Explainer or informational videos, influencer testimonial videos and other types of video that are :60 or less can be highly effective, especially with a clear call-to-action for the viewer to take the next step.
- Write Compelling Headlines. Words and length do matter. Use keywords searchers are looking for. Use active verbs. And be succinct.
- Always Include a Call-to-Action. It’s hard to drive a measurable action if you don’t tell the reader what to do and then measure the success of that. This can be asking readers to watch a video, go to your website to register for an event or download a whitepaper, use a promotional code you provide, or some similar measurable action.
- Engage with Your Audience. Encourage engagement by asking questions, responding to comments, and creating a sense of community around your content.
- Provide a Great User Experience. Don’t make readers jump to too many places to take the actions you request. One link to a website for a video or registration is good. Two or more is not a good experience and people will abort their journey with you if you require them to take too many steps.
- Measure and Track Your Results. Use analytics tools to track the performance of your content and make data-driven decisions.
- Continuously Evaluate and Improve. Continuously evaluate your content marketing strategy and make changes as needed to improve results and drive success.
By following these steps, you can create a content marketing strategy that is effective, engaging, and aligned with your business goals. Remember, content marketing is an ongoing process, and it’s essential to continually assess and adapt your strategy to ensure its effectiveness.