What is Content Marketing ?

No matter what kind of digital marketing you engage in, you also be needing great content. Great content doesn’t mean promoting your products or service endlessly. Instead, it offers real value to customers/people – and most significantly, it serves a purpose.

Defining content marketing

When you have great content, whether that’s via a new video uploaded to your website, a funny email, or an informative blog post. A customer going to want to spend time with it and share it with their friends. This positive sentiment, in turn, is often great for your bottom line, because it usually leads to better customers who are loyal to your brand.

So it is sensible to ensure that content marketing is at the heart of all your marketing tactics. Let’s dive straight into the planet of content marketing and what it can do for your business.

We start with a definition of content marketing. Content marketing is the creation and sharing of content in different formats such as videos, blogs, and social media posts, to create interest in a product or service.

 Nowadays it’s extremely important for marketers to understand content marketing and how it works. The increase of ad blockers, algorithms, private social, and lots of other factors is increasingly limiting our ability to reach consumers. However, content marketing cuts through these barriers, because it’s centered on creating written and visual assets that have a genuine and intrinsic value to people.

This requires a change of thinking for many marketers because it doesn’t desire marketing. And this is often precisely why it works.

Purpose of content marketing

The purpose of content marketing is to drive both inbound customer engagement and organic searches (using search engine optimization, or SEO) from an outlined audience, which may then be nurtured to convert into valuable customers. Content is strategically created or curated, and distributed in key locations across the web to attract customers to your website.

What is Inbound marketing?

But what exactly is inbound marketing? Well, it’s a technique where brands use content marketing to attract customers. The key driver of inbound marketing is consumer intent as potential customers actively hunt down the brand’s content. As a result, consumers are more engaged and take action if the brand were to communicate with them when they are not actively interested.

What is Outbound marketing?

Outbound marketing, on the opposite hand, is when the brand pushes its messages out to as many people as it can within a target audience. The brand believes that this audience may be a good match for the product or service being advertised. Of course, consumers won’t be interested in the product at that particular time! So this makes outbound advertising generally less effective than inbound marketing if we compare.

 

What is a content marketing strategy?

Content marketing provides valuable search traffic and engagement. They successively can increase the number of valuable actions taken by your audience.

To create a successful content marketing campaign, you initially need a strategy! In content strategy, you set the goals and scope of your project. It keeps everything on target while providing a roadmap outlining the different aspects of your campaign.

Applying funnel techniques

A conversion funnel can be used as a guide when you are creating your strategy. This permits you to map your content to key decision points in the consumer journey and address their needs. The conversion funnel helps you understand the buyer journey by tracking the different steps a typical consumer would complete on the way to taking a valuable action, like a purchase, sign-up, or contact request. Marketers should use insight and knowledge from a funnel to drive more engagement.

To apply funnel techniques to your content strategy:

* Begin with awareness content for the highest of the funnel to get the word out there.

* Create consideration content for the center parts of the funnel, when people are assessing options within the market.

* Produce high-impact conversion content for the underside of the funnel. This drives people to require action.

* Create retention content for past purchasers to show them to repeat purchasers, or maybe brand advocates.

* It’d also be worth creating re-engagement content for people who’ve dropped out at different stages of the consumer journey to entice them back.

Where appropriate, marketers can use what is known as hero content as part of the funnel. This is often high-value content that aims to drive brand awareness. Although it’s created less frequently, it can cause a brand’s message to travel viral! Examples of hero content include research studies, top-quality infographics, e-books, and highly unique and desirable audio/video (AV) content like exclusive videos or podcasts.

What is a content strategy?

So why develop a content strategy? Well, there are plenty of moving parts in a content strategy. It’s a useful document to make to get buy-in and sign-off from stakeholders. It also can act as a roadmap for the project itself. And it is often referred to when queries arise and can be adapted to suit the changing needs of the campaign and audience, as needed.

* A content strategy ensures content is developed for the purpose by:

* Defining your objectives, KPIs, budgets, and audience personas

* Capturing your brand or campaign story

* Detailing production pieces, like formats and timings

* Outlining distribution channels

* Measuring the performance of your content in terms of business impact and KPIs

Key considerations when developing a content strategy

 Take these key points, dependencies, and constraints under consideration when developing a content strategy:

• Scope of production: Identify what sort of content and quantity of assets and formats you plan to deliver.

 • Timeline for production: When will you deliver each part of the strategy? Plan your timeline carefully and ensure you’ve allowed enough time for each stage of production.

 • Budget and production resources: what’s required in terms of money and people to deliver your content efficiently?

 • Upstream dependencies: What has got to happen for the strategy to progress? Try to identify any potential issues in advance and put a solution or alternative plan into place.

 • Downstream dependencies: What must the strategy deliver for something else to progress?

 • Risks: What could happen to derail the plan? think about some contingency time for unexpected delays or complications.

 It takes time to plan and execute a content marketing strategy effectively. Because there are many moving parts, you’ll have to be flexible and ensure your strategy is agile. Can it evolve in response to changing business objectives, KPIs, and performance? quite any other discipline, content, and asset production takes time and money. So, as for the strategy to succeed, you want to understand the full requirements to deliver on your plan from the beginning.

 What is a buyer persona?

 One tactic that content marketers can use to develop a successful strategy is to develop buyer personas.

 A buyer persona may be a snapshot of your ideal customer. You would like to know as much as you can about the behaviors and attitudes of your ideal customer, in reference to the objectives you have set for your content strategy. This will then help you to focus on creating the most engaging content for your customer.

 Benefits of using buyer personas

 The benefits of using buyer personas to inform your content creation include:

 • Improved targeting: Personas facilitate you to adjust and focus your content, in order that it is strategically positioned to target consumers who are likely to be interested in it. Personas provide valuable insights that you simply can use to convey your message to the right audience at the right time. They also enable you to perform marketing research, targeted advertising, usability testing, and keyword research more efficiently.

 • Format: Personas offer you the information and perspective you need in order to make objective decisions about how to craft your brand messages through the most consumed and widely accepted formats like videos, social media posts, and articles. This enables you to create compelling content that meets the needs of each persona.

 • Discovery: Personas facilitate you’re discovery insights into your audience’s channel behavior. Where are they having conversations? What topics are they interested in? If you distribute tailored content to where your audience is already active, you’ll then leverage their online behaviors to the maximum effect for your business and your content marketing.

 Key considerations when developing buyer personas

 It’s vital to develop your personas to support your audience’s content and information needs. You’ll then position your brand or business as the solution to their requirements.

 Ask yourself the subsequent questions when creating personas:

 • Objectives: What are your ideal customers looking for? How many competitors will they consider? What information is pertinent to their decision?

 • Location: Where are your personas from? Where are they based? This may include cultural considerations.

 • Demographic: What age bracket are they in? What is their marital status?

 • Job details: What’s their economic position or job role?

 • Platforms: Which online platforms do they use? Where is the conversation happening with your target audience?

 • Devices: What devices do your personas primarily use to access the internet? What quite a connection do they have? For example, is its high-speed broadband?

 • Purchase behaviors: What steps do they take when considering a purchase?

 Interests: What topics are they interested in? What issues are they trying to solve? How do these issues impact their lives? How can your brand help? And the way will be solving these issues benefit them and your brand?

 You can gather a lot of information from social media, and search and website analytics, but a number of the more specific questions may require you to conduct some primary research via interviews, focus groups, or surveys.

 Best practices when using buyer personas

 When using buyer personas in your content strategy, follow these best practices:

 • Prioritize: you’ll prioritize your personas in terms of how easy it is to reach them; or you may consider their value to your business. You’ll use a reach/value matrix to help visualize this.

 • Budgets and resources: Use your prioritization to assist set budgets for production and allocating resources.

 • Creative messaging: Develop creative messaging and assets that align with their needs, solve their problems, and showcase your business in a useful, authentic way.

 • Content distribution: Distribute your content to the channels and devices they use, and align your content production outputs to the wants of these channels.

 • Purchase journey: Create the kinds of content they need at key stages of their purchase journey.

 • Internal expectations and KPIs: Manage internal expectations and set KPIs for conversion outcomes by understanding the standard conversion journey, as detailed in your persona research.

 Now you recognize what content marketing is, and therefore the importance of developing an effective content marketing strategy that’s centered on the needs, attitudes, and behaviors of your audience. You’ve got the basic know-how, so jump right in – there’s nothing stopping you! Start creating compelling, valuable content today that your audience likes to share and that delivers for your business at the same time.