To succeed in the modern business world, it’s not enough to have a company, product, or service and expect sales to follow. You will need to learn how to manage contemporary marketing platforms showcasing your offerings to the right audience at the right time.
Content marketing, also known as inbound marketing, can help you achieve these goals by creating valuable content that attracts potential clients and encourages them to make purchases or take other actions with your brand in mind. If you’re looking to build on your existing content marketing strategy or launch one from scratch, consider these tips.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is an approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer actions. Content marketing is founded on building strong brands by delivering relevant information that teaches customers about your products and services.
It makes your brand more human-centric by showing consumers what it’s like working with you. Your brand becomes worth talking about in its own right rather than as just another option in whatever category you operate in. When done correctly, content marketing can help companies achieve greater brand awareness and visibility within their target markets – an invaluable way of helping potential customers learn more about your company without feeling as though they are being sold anything directly at all.
Set Your Business Goals & Objectives
It is essential for your business to outline goals and expectations around your content marketing strategy before you get started publishing materials. A range of questions you may want to ask yourself to help with this include, ‘What are my long-term business goals?’ ‘How will content marketing help achieve these goals?’ ‘How often do I want to publish content on my branded platforms?’ Consider both qualitative and quantitative answers to these points when you are developing these strategies. Define what success looks like for your brand, from traffic stats to customer loyalty rates.
Define Your Buyer Personas
Understanding who exactly your customers are is integral to creating relevant and helpful content for them to engage with. A Buyer Persona is creating an example, ideal customer with defined traits to direct your marketing efforts towards. There are many different methods of defining buyer personas, from extensive surveys and in-depth interviews with customers and prospects, to simply observing their online behaviour. While there’s no one way of doing it, developing buyer personas will help guide your content creation process as well as any future business decisions related to marketing.
Selecting Your Ideal Content Channels
You can quickly become overwhelmed with the amount of content channels available, but simply put, there are really two types to choose from: paid and organic. Paid channels cost money, whereas organic channels are free but might not have as high of an impact on SEO or brand recognition.
Paid-channel marketing strategies include placing ads in major publications or via popular websites that get massive amounts of traffic, such as Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Organic-channel marketing involves less costly means such as guest blogging on high-traffic blogs and maintaining an active social media presence on sites like Instagram and Facebook.
Both types can be effective in building your brand awareness and increasing your SEO ranking; it’s just a matter of determining what will be most beneficial for your individual goals and keeping track of how you allocate resources into your content efforts. Referring to your buyer persona can aid in this.
Determine Your Content Formats
What is your target audience more likely to consume, read or click on? An infographic? A video? Content marketing is about grabbing their attention on the platforms they’re using, so consider what your target audience wants and prioritise content formats that align with their needs. Use content format prioritisation as another way of differentiating your business from competitors in search results.
Develop a Strong Content Calendar
It can be so easy to fall behind on content creation, but consistency is key to remaining front of mind with audiences. A content calendar can help you plan ahead on the types of content you are set to produce, the platforms they will be published on, and the budget you will place behind them. Doing this well enough in advance can help you better manage your time and ensure no opportunities are missed.
