The exponential increase of content that we consume over the internet daily is a solid evidence that content marketing holds the key for anyone who wants to create lasting impact on their target audience.
Content marketing can be daunting for beginners, however, there has been never a compelling reason to start. With new content flooding the internet, it is essential to stand out from the crowd. The content should be educational, inspiring, valuable, and relevant to the needs of your users.
Here we will learn how to create and structure the content to attract readers interest and engage with your content. It will help you to boost awareness of your brand and build trust among your audience. So let’s get started.
How do you define content?
The term content may be defined as any information put in a webpage. It must be relevant to the readers and provide best solution to the readers. It refers to blog posts, social media posts, videos, infographics etc. It is the simplest way to market and promote your brand, products and services by engaging your audience.
What is content marketing strategy?
Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing content to attract and acquire defined audience with the objective to drive customer action.
What are the examples of content marketing?
There are many types of content marketing and once you know how to write content, you will get many content marketing ideas every day. Let us understand few of the content marketing examples to get you started,
- Infographics – They are generally vertical graphics that include statistics, charts, graphics, and other information. It can organize data in a more compelling way than words alone. It allows you to share lot of data in a clear way and easy to understand.
- Blog posts – You are already reading a blog post. It should be published regularly to attract new visitors. It should provide valuable content to your audience that makes them to share your post on social media and across other websites. I recommend blog posts between 100 and 2000 words in length, but it is recommended to see if your audience prefers longer or shorted reads.
- Podcasts – The number of podcast listeners is growing. It will help audiences find your brand if they do not have time to read content every day. If you are interested in interviewing people or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.
- Videos – Videos are highly engaging content medium and shareable across social media platforms. It is 40X more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content.
- eBooks – These are lead generation tools that enable potential customers to fill a form with their details before they can download an eBook. They are longer and are more in depth, published less frequently than a blog post which are written to attract visitors to website.
- Social Media – Posting on social media is pivotal to amplify your brand’s reach and delivering content to your customers. Social networks include:
(a)Facebook
(b)Instagram
(c)Twitter
(d)LinkedIn
(e)YouTube
(f)Pinterest
(g)Snapchat
What are content marketing tools?
Your mastery in content marketing tools determine how successful you would be as a content marketer. There are many content marketing tools that can help create actionable content which includes:
- HubSpot
- WordPress
- Slack
- Trello
- Google Analytics
- SEMrush
- Moz
- Mailchimp
- Salesforce
- Zoho
What are content features?
Content features are the features that every content in a website should have.
- Include categories across the content to content to show visitors what space you are into.
- Choose images that are relevant to your topic.
- Include date of publish to show the frequency of your content.
- Share buttons to enable visitors to share the content they like.
- Call to action & subscription buttons.
What makes content successful?
Any business can make their content effective if they focus on these three key elements:
- Make it entertaining – You must earn the interest of your visitors. This means that your content needs to be focused on the desires and needs of your customers. Content that benefits your customers or solves their problem. Make sure your content format is audience friendly and entertaining to them. Use plenty of subheads, white space and a clear font that is readable by someone over age of 12.
- Make it Strategic – Not all content should be entertaining though but strategic too. It should make your prospect closer to becoming a customer. It means you understand social proofs, call to action, your USP and you use these elements in your content.
- Make it shareable – It is also a type of content marketing as we saw above in the article. It is the most cost-effective way to carry content right to the prospect you are looking for. It enables you share your entertaining and strategic content on social media.
What makes a good content marketer?
A good content marketer should be value focused and fulfil search intent of his audience. The top content marketer is empathetic, putting themselves in the shoes of their users and truly understand their needs. They are a good storyteller.
What is the difference between content writing and content marketing?
Content writing is the execution to content marketing by creating content to be used on web pages, blog posts, social media, and other marketing collaterals. Content marketing is a holistic plan on ways to use content to generate sales and leads. The content marketer provides the roadmap whereas the content writer scales the roadmap with research driven content.
Sales pages, direct mail, landing pages are some of the mediums that fall into content writing. If you want to quickly persuade an audience to complete an action, then content writing is a way. Whereas content marketing is a slow build. You will not win over your audience instantaneously.
Why content marketing strategy is important?
- Awareness – Customer should be aware that there is a solution to their problem. Prior to making purchase, they need to be made aware of the solutions that exist.
- Research – Once the customer is aware that there is a solution, they will research to educate themselves. For example, if a customer wants to buy a smartphone, he will research and try to find different types of smartphones that exist in the market and find which one fits his needs.
- Consideration – At this point, customer starts comparing different smartphone to ensure that he purchases good smartphone at a fair price.
- Buy – Finally, the customer makes the decision and purchases the smartphone.
Content marketing taps into first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating customers about a product before they can consider for purchase. The ROI can be tremendous if executed properly.
It also provides additional benefit that it supports other digital marketing channels. It provides additional content for social media marketing and contribute to SEO by generating natural inbound links and building good content on website that gets found in search engines.
How to create content marketing strategy?
A content strategy is the strategy that takes your business goals from increasing brand awareness to driving more revenue. The secret of content marketing is adding value to people. It should support people on bot sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their challenges are, and those who are already using your products and services to overcome these challenges.
Evaluate which content format works well for your audience – Infographics, videos, blog posts? As you create different content formats, you will also have different channels to publish to. Channels can include your website, blog posts, social media properties such as Facebook, Twitter etc.,
Let’s learn how to create content marketing strategy now,
- Define goal – what is your goal for developing the content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content? Know your goas before you plan. This will help in determining what is the best strategy.
- Persona research – To develop a successful plan, you need to define your content’s target audience also known as buyer’s persona. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content.
- Do a content audit – Review your previous content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what can be done differently in the upcoming year to align your team’s goals with the rest of the organization’s goals.
Conclusion
Content is king as it is known. It is the medium of expressing knowledge and information by video, audio, or writing. Great content needs research. A quality content should be friendly and informational.
As a content marketer, you need to scale your efforts 100% of the time through the channels mentioned above in the article. Content personalization allows you to personalize the content effectively because you provide content to each person tailored to their needs.