Today, marketing is not all about telling people how “good” your product is, it is all about storytelling. This is what content marketing does.
So what is content marketing? 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.” [1]
Consumers are now tired of traditional marketing that only focused on product promotion. Instead, they want information that helps them improve the quality of their lives. This is why content marketing has become more attractive for both B2B and B2C marketers to generate sales, as 88% of B2B marketers and 76% of B2C marketers used content marketing in 2016. [1]
Before diving straight into creating content, you need a fully-developed content marketing strategy that is aligned with your overall marketing and digital marketing strategy and carefully tracked and evaluated.
Successful content marketing strategy requires 4 steps: identify your target, select distribution platforms, create content, and monitor the results. [2]
1. Identify and Develop Your Target
This is important. When you create content, you always have to keep your specific, clearly-defined target audience in mind. The content should be useful to them, relevant to their lives, and motivational enough for them to take the actions you call for, such as to subscribe an email list, follow Social Media account, or go to the website.
This first step includes gathering the right data, such as Google Analytics, drawing insights from the data, and creating a realistic human story around it. Go beyond basic factors, such as gender, age, education level, or income. Describe the person’s “a day in life,” dreams, fears, interaction with technology, or the current brands used. From then, answer these questions: What does he/she want?; What problems is he/she facing?; How can your product or service solve his/her problems?
Sounds like a lot of work ? Yes, it is a lot of work. But believe me, having your clear target audience in mind will make your content creation a lot easier than having none.
2. Select Distribution Platforms
The second step is to select distribution platforms that fit into your target audience. This step is hard even when you identify your target audience, because there are so many platforms online. Therefore, it is okay to do some trial and errors as you experiment with different types of content to see what is the most effective for your strategy.
These are some of the popular distribution platforms :
- Blog posts and articles
- Infographics
- Videos
- Ebooks and whitepapers
- Email newsletters
- Social media posts
- Podcasts
- E-courses and webinars
3. Create Content
The thirst step is to create content. Again, your content should be useful and relevant to your target audience.
There are three main sources of content:
- Original content, in which marketers create content themselves
- Curate content, in which marketers publish all or part of good content from other publishers with explanation to their audience about its relevance
- Syndicated content, in which marketers purchase content from a recognized source
A study by Curata in 2014 showed that marketers use 65% created content and 25% curated content. [1]
When creating original content, keep the three following rules in mind:
- Integrate keywords: research keywords that your target audience might use to search for their needs, and integrate them into your content to generate more organic traffics
- Develop your brand’s voice: use appropriate language and tone depending on your target audience
- Stay consistent: it is very important to develop content schedule and stick to it
4. Monitor the results
Lastly, it is important to monitor conversations surrounding brand content to gain insights about what can improve your content to be more effective.
There are four key types of content metrics that many content marketers use to analyze the results:
- Consumption: How many people are reaching content ?
- Sharing: Which content is being shared by whom and to where ?
- Lead generation: How is content generating leads ?
- Sales: Is content driving sales and revenue ?
Conclusion
Content marketing strategy should be followed, analyzed, and revised consistently if you want many audience to engage and see your content. If you keep this 4-step process going, you will definitely get better results in your content marketing performance!
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Footnotes:
[1] Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies, 4th Edition by Mary Roberts & Zahay; ISBN: 978133750187
[2] Relevance, Team. “9 Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy.” Relevance, 12 Sept. 2017, http://www.relevance.com/9-steps-to-creating-a-successful-content-marketing-strategy/.