“Content is the new Ad, #Hashtag is the new Tagline.”
Philip Kotler, The father of modern marketing
The majority of today’s marketers have agreed that content marketing is here to stay and the practice is not going anywhere anytime soon. For businesses of all sizes and stages, content marketing has the potential to lure customers towards them.
In this post, we will discuss the entire process of content marketing step by step. Where to start, how to start, what are the available formats, where to promote, and what tools to use to measure the campaigns.
Content marketing defined
Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating, and distributing content that provides value, is relevant, and consistent which attracts and retains a clearly defined group audience, and drives more customer action.
Does the business need content marketing?
To answer this question you have to understand why your business may need content marketing. The answer is simple. People are constantly seeking information. Google processes approximately 63,000 search queries every second. translating to 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. This metric is enough to prove how much people are looking for knowledge and to feed that hunger there must be content.
Providing content that meets the needs of your target audience can potentially make you a trusted source for them and with trust, you can build a sustainable relationship that’ll in time increase your sales.
Another reason you should choose this approach is that people are finding advertising ver unappealing, no one wants to be disturbed by adverts when their favorite show is going on other than that people are aware of the value of their time. Even you as a customer have skipped an ad before and you will in the future. It’s less likely that you’ll take your time and watch an advert.
Should you focus on quality or quantity?
Well, content marketing has started to become more and more popular every single day and as it’s becoming more popular the competition is also rising like never before. So to stand out and make a place for yourself you need quality content, not just stacks of poorly produced content, and your content provide value to the audience.
What else do you need to focus on?
The goal of content marketing is to establish a relationship with your audience and to do that you must focus on making your content engaging because no matter how much you interact with your audience creating relationships is not a one-way road, to make your audience interact with you as well you must come up with content that engaging and interactive.
Create your content marketing strategy first
Before jumping in you need to come up with your strategy first. As most people think that content marketing is all about producing and publishing set yourself a step ahead by coming up with an effective strategy.
Here are the 7 steps you need to follow to create your content marketing strategy
Set goals
Not setting goals can easily make you forget your purpose in content marketing. For any kind of marketing content marketing to be more specific you need to have a specific and clearly defined goal.
Content marketing goals can be divided into categories:
Brand-oriented goals such as brand awareness, loyalty, and advocacy, engagement.
Brand-oriented goals such as conversion and lead generation.
By setting the goal you help decide the type and format of the content, the distribution medium, and the evaluation metrics.
Map your audience
As in any other type of marketing content marketing defining your audience is also important. I’ll help you determine what’ll be the correct topic to create content for your audience. After defining your audience you wanna segment them and profile them to get a better understanding of their psychology.
Generate Ideas and Plan
Now that who your audience is and what kind of content they’re interested in it’s about time you need to come up with content ideas and start planning your content. While doing you need to consider the 3 following things:
Theme: The theme of your content should be relevant to your customer’s needs and resonate with their pain point, at the same time it should reflect your brand as well and it must provide some solution to the pain and the needs of your customers.
Format: Decide on which format of content you want to produce, such as blog, article, videos, podcast, etc.
Narrative: Tell a story to your customers through the content that’ll take them to the next level of the marketing funnel and eventually convert.
Start Producing
Finally, it’s about time you start producing your content. You must produce high-quality, relevant, and original content.
Publish
Producing all this high-quality content will go in vain if that doesn’t reach the audience. Therefore you need to start publishing your content and not publish them randomly but strategically in mediums that you think your audience most likely hang out with the most.
Promote your content
Even if you distribute your content on the right platform you need to make some extra efforts to get your content noticed. A very popular and effective way to promote your content is through influencers. It is popular because influencers have the power to determine their fan’s behaviors.
Evaluate Performance
The last step of your content marketing circle is Evaluating the performance of your campaigns.
You don’t just wanna create and publish content, you also wanna monitor various and measure the performance of your content marketing efforts.
The metrics you wanna use will basically be set depending on the goal that you set in step 1. Otherwise, you can also use metrics based on the stage of your customer journey. Basically, you’ll be using the following metrics
- Visibility metrics: Like the impressions, your content gets, The number of unique viewers
- Relatability metrics: Page view per visitor, TIme on site
- Search Engine metrics: Search engine position and referrals.
- Action-Metrics: CTA conversion, Click through rate
- Share-Metrics: Share ratio.
Popular Content Marketing Types
In the third stage of your content marketing circle where you generate ideas and plan you’ll select the type of content, you’ll be creating for your content marketing campaign. Usually, the type is chosen keeping the target audience in mind,
There are types of content formats, and marketers usually choose a mix of different formats. This brings diversity to your overall content marketing effort and you can be more engageable to a large-scale audience. You can also choose various types of content formats based on the customer journey stages.
The followings are the most popular content marketing types
Video
We all know that in today’s world video is the king of all content. Audiences of all demographics will appreciate a good video because it’s easily digestible and much more exciting in nature than any other content format.
Images
After the video, the second most popular format of content marketing is Images. As the saying goes “A picture can say a thousand words”. The image format of your content can be any pictures, carousals, memes, presentation slides, a screenshot, etc.
Blog & Articles
Another Popular text-based content formats are blogs and articles. Blogs are pieces of content created from a personal point of view and convey a personal message based on personal experience which adds a very human nature to it, on the articles are expresses facts, news, research meterials, etc.
Podcasts
Podcasts are becoming more and more popular every single day. The concept came from radio shows. It’s more of an interview-based content and it can be both video and audio format. People can listen to your podcast at their convenience and you attract more audience to your brand.
Reports
Reports are mainly based on information. It can be a case study, white papers, etc. It is well appreciated by people who are looking for information.
Events & Webinars
Webinars are informational video content consisting of presentations or interviews with industry experts. Events, on the other hand, are physical that happen in real-time, but you can broadcast them live on social media or on your website as video content.
Content Distribution Channels
Website
The very first place where you wanna distribute your content is on your website. Because customers will most likely take action on your website and that is why you wanna drive traffic to your website and you can achieve that through content.
Social Profiles
Social profiles are the second best place to distribute your content. Social media is for people to socialize online. So distributing content to capture the attention of those people just makes sense. Certain social media platforms will let you create communities as well where the fans and followers of your brand can directly interact with your brand and speak on behalf of your brand.
Video platform
We already know that the media is king. As we all know it’s the most engaging content format, video sharing platforms are also the most popular and are a great platform where your brand can get more exposure. You can utilize platforms like youtube, IGTV, Facebook, Vimeo, whistia, etc for sharing your video content which not only will get you more exposure but also will increase your SEO in the long run.
The End Note
The end note is it’s all about what people like to read, listen to, and watch, therefore content marketing is not a one-way street. Your content has to be engaging and human enough so that your audience interacts with it and creates a pathway for your brand to interact with the customers.
