Do you feel like the efforts you make in creating content don’t seem to match the results you get? Besides marketing your products and services, does your content win you a better brand image to your readers?
In this article, we’ll talk about content marketing, and the role it plays in making your business and your content stand out. We’ll see how organizing your marketing efforts around content is better and more effective compared to just pumping out content.
If you run a business that depends on content for marketing, this will be a good read for you, a eureka moment where everything in your game finally clicks!
It’s hard to depend on traditional marketing methods for a proactive marketer who wants to capture new audiences today.
Consumers are more “aware” now, and old-time marketing gimmicks don’t work anymore.
We are in a time where you need to provide true value in relevant and useful content, before pitching your services or products.
Content marketing is a form of digital marketing that focuses on creating and distributing original, value-added content to attract and convert customers or prospects for your product or service.
Content can take the form of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, eBooks, white papers, case studies, or webinars.
The purpose of content marketing is to reach your target audience when they are in the process of looking for solutions or answers and establish yourself as an expert in your field.
The idea behind content marketing is that you will attract, engage, and retain your audience through relevant content.
To the audience, content marketing will prop your expertise, promote awareness for your brand, and keep you at the top of their minds when it’s time to buy the services you sell.
This means that content marketing is a long-term game plan that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience.
Your main job is to provide them with high-quality, relevant, and useful information consistently.
Research from Content Marketing Institute indicates that leading marketers and brands such as Cisco Systems, John Deere, Microsoft, etc., also use content marketing.
Content marketing is great for your bottom line and some of the best benefits that enterprises using content marketing realize include;
- Huge cost savings
- Better, loyal customers
- Increased sales
- Profitable content pools
Why Marketing and Great Content Go Together
Social media marketing: An effective social media strategy depends on a well-thought-out content marketing strategy. Your audience will only pay attention if your content is relevant, useful, and helpful.
SEO: Search engines appreciate content that is relevant and of high quality. Bonus points to consistency in your publishing frequency.
PR: Successful PR today revolves around addressing issues that your readers care about, and not content about your business.
Inbound traffic: Your inbound leads and traffic are as good as your content is.
Content Strategy: A clear content strategy that has your audience at its core will mean more in terms of traffic, leads, and sales.
For effective content marketing, you need a documented content marketing strategy. Use our 16-page guide to know how to develop your content marketing strategy.
Why Content Marketing?
Content marketing is all about storytelling and high-quality content. The concept of content marketing existed even before John F. Oppedahl coined it at a journalism conference in 1996.
Lots of businesses use it and have used it for hundreds of years even before the term was coined.
But, is content marketing great for your business?
Just because the early adopters had success with content marketing doesn’t mean it will work for your business today. And even if big B2B and B2C businesses use it, there’s no guarantee it will work for you.
In the end, our aim is to help you understand if content marketing is right for you. We’ll also try and find out if you should invest your time and money in it.
A B2C content creator’s main aim is to create more engaging content, and understand what works, and what doesn’t.
By virtue of priorities from the data in the GIF above, it’s correct to infer that the biggest priority of creating more engaging content is because companies are not satisfied with their content marketing efforts.
They probably feel that they could do a lot better. And this inference is confirmed by a research study that proved that 70% of B2B content marketers can’t keep up with content quality and quantity.
There is a need to create more and better content because every year marks an increase in the amount of low quality, terrible content being added online.
By having a content marketing plan in place, you will have better chances of success by standing out among the crowd of mediocre content clutter.
Standing out from all the content noise spewed on the internet is our next topic. Let’s see how you can stand out.
Using the Customer Journey to Create a Content Map
Content mapping is all about you as a business owner understanding your audience so well that you create relevant content for each stage of their journey towards buying your products/ services.
The idea behind content mapping is that people take a lot of time before buying and content marketing helps you help your audience through the whole journey.
So, rather than ignoring the journey a customer takes before buying, and end up losing them, content marketing can help in walking them through a sales funnel.
Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
A recent study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs shows that 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content marketing strategy.
Yet, there are many content marketing strategies and mediums that you can use to deliver content to your audience.
And given the leverage that content mapping adds to content marketing, companies with an elaborate content marketing strategy are bound to experience more success.
You can therefore assume, that failure is imminent if you don’t have a strategy in place for your content marketing efforts. Rather, your chances of success or failure are based on luck.
Step 1: Set Your Mission Statement and Goals
The first step to creating a content marketing strategy that works is creating a mission statement. A content marketing mission statement will help you know what is important, and what is not necessary.
You want your content marketing strategy to capture the following ideas;
- Who you are as a business (your identity)
- A clear indication of the services content
- Your target audience
- the benefits you will provide for them
Here is an example of OptinMonster’s content marketing mission statement from the OptinMonster About Page.
OptinMonster targets {small businesses to Fortune 500 copanies} with {strategies and tools for improving conversion} to {increase subscriber growth and overall sales.}
Here’s an example of Google’s mission statement.
Google aims to {organize information} and {make it more accessible and useful} to {the world}.
And what of Sellential;
We provide {small businesses} with {well-researched, relevant, and customer-centric content} to help them {realize more profits in their content marketing efforts}.
While you capture what your audience will get in your mission statement, it’s also imperative that your content marketing strategy captures what your business will also get. At this point, you can set your business goals.
Another great example is Listiller, which is taking an unconventional approach to packaging itself as the go-to website for freelancers and bloggers; unlike other job boards and freelance platforms.
Typical goals for most businesses include;
- Improving your revenue as a result of the content marketing efforts you put in place
- Driving more sales and getting high quality leads- as a necessity for increasing your revenues
- Gaining more traffic to your website- to increase the possibilities of of achieving your other goals.
- Bolstering the perception of your business and brand, to gain more influence and authority, and be seen as a thought leader.
- SEO success which contributes to the achievement of other goals
- Reducing your marketing costs as your content becomes a more effective marketing tool
- Leveraging social media which helps you meet your authority and traffic goals.
Step 2: Figure Out Your KPIs
KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators are metrics that help you in measuring if your content marketing strategy is on track and bringing in results.
By making your goals specific and measurable, you have a way of knowing when you hit milestones.
Your KPIs should capture what you aim for in traffic, SEO, sales, revenue, and other digital marketing aspects such as social media metrics, and email marketing ROI.
They should be specific in terms of the results you aim to achieve. For example;
- Hitting a particular revenue target in a specified period (month, quarterly, yearly
- Getting more signups for your lead magnet to prove success in your lead generation efforts
- Acquiring a new number of email subscribers over a specific timeline
- Increased in site traffic and overall engagement on your content
- Improved rankings on search engines for key pages to help boost your traffic
- Getting mentions, shares, likes, comments and more on key content pieces.
- Receiving invitations to key events in the industry
Step 3: Know Your Audience
As mentioned earlier, part of your content marketing strategy is having a clear understanding of who your audience is. With this, you can work the right content to reach them.
Here are 3 actions that will help you understand your audience better.
1) Collect Demographic Data
The first step to understanding your audience is by figuring out the demography. You can get the demographics of your email subscribers, site visitors, and social media followers.
Social media analytics, email subscriber analytics, and web analytics will help you in obtaining the demographics of your audience.
Must have demographic data includes;
- age
- education
- Income
- Gender
Demographic data can go further into defining the interests of your audience.
Google Analytics and most social media analytics provide an overview of the interests of your audience’s interests.
You will even have information on possible market segments that your audience fits.
2) Collect Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is a rich resource in helping you know and understand your audience.
By collecting feedback from your customers;
- You can tell how your audience feels about your content
- You can identify their most immediate needs
- You can identify better ways of delivering solutions to their problems with your content.
As a business, customer feedback will help you;
- Figure out your audience’s priorities
- Identify the best places/ channels to reach your clients
- Create a more detailed buyer persona (which is what we’ll discuss next.
3) Create a Buyer Persona
By gathering demographic data and feedback from your customers, you are now able to create detailed buyer personas for your business.
A buyer persona gives you a detailed overview of the reader who consumes your content and buys your products/ services. And with detailed buyer personas, creating content for your readers is even easier.
The most effective customer avatars often capture details of a customer’s biggest challenges and their greatest motivation for change.
Step 4: Assessing Your Current Position
Chances are, you already have content on your blog, social media channels, etc.
You need to evaluate and check to see if this content is helping you meet your goals.
At this stage, you need to audit your content, measure your success, and identify content gaps that you can cover more.
You also need to compare your content to that of your competitors.
You can the assess if creating newer content will give you more leverage in the market.
Some of the tools that can help you audit your content include Screaming Frog and Content Analyzer.
These tools will help you log your content and audit your content titles, meta descriptions, content length, social shares, backlinks, and any other useful metrics that indicate how your content is performing.
Tools such as SEMRush and AHREFs will help you know the number of inbound links to your websites (backlinks) and their quality, your keywords ranking on search engines, and the number of social shares your content has received.
For the content that is not doing well, you can then choose to improve it by updating it, or you can remove and replace it with better content.
If there are any content gaps, you can then go ahead and exploit them.
Content gaps to note include;
- Questions asked by your target audience that you’ve not yet answered
- Content that is ranking well but could do with some improvement
- Keywords that relate to your niche that you haven’t covered yet.
Step 5: Determine the Best Content Channels
Understanding who your customer is, building a buyer’s persona, and assessing your content- all lead to a better understanding of what communication channel best suits your audience.
The best content channel is one that is already working for you. You can then expand from there.
It is easier to leverage your best content channel than try doing multiple channels together.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics come in handy at this stage.
On your Google Analytics dashboard, click on Acquisition>> Social>> Overview. Here you will see the main social networks where your content is shared.
A tool like BuzzSumo will also help you see data such as;
- the number of shares by social networks
- shares by content type
- shares by content length
- top content in the past 1 year
Step6: Choose Your Content Types
The next step in your journey to creating an effective content marketing plan is to choose the types of content that you need to create.
For most content marketing efforts, a core content type in the form of content is published on your website and then repurposed for sharing on other content channels.
Other content types that might be necessary for an effective content marketing strategy include visual content such as video.
Video marketing is a big plus to a content marketing strategy.
It improves engagement significantly. Increased engagement on your content reduces abandonment and ramps up your lead generation.
Infographics also enhance engagement and interaction with your content.
Tools such as Canva and Piktochart are effective in creating custom graphics and memes for social media marketing.
Other content types that can help you in improving lead generation include webinars, e-books, worksheets, checklists, etc.
Here’s a list of content marketing formats you can use for your content marketing strategy.
Step 7: Identify and Allocate Resources
By now, you already know what type of content you should create, your audience, and the best channel for publishing and promoting it to your audience.
You now need to bring everything together and ensure that you execute your content marketing plan successfully.
Some of the questions to ask yourself at this stage include;
- Who is going to handle the process of creating and maintaining your content?
- What physical, digital, and human resources do you need to create your content?
- How does your publishing workflow look like, including scheduling the content for publishing?
Who creates and maintains your content?
It’s imperative that you designate this role to a person who will handle the process of creating content.
Depending on the size of your company, you might need a content team if you will do everything in-house. Otherwise, you’ll need to farm out all your content production needs.
Here’s an example of an authority ladder to help you meet your content marketing needs.
- The CEO or Chief Marketing Officer has the final say over the content strategy and content.
- Your content marketing manager will oversee the delivery of your content marketing strategy and work with the content team to deliver daily results.
- Your content team is made up of individuals who create content based on their expertise.
Tools and Resources
Tools and resources are necessary to execute an effective content marketing strategy.
To keep your content marketing strategy on course, you will need;
- In-house/ remotely hired content creators
- Video marketing specialists, graphic designers, podcast managers, etc.
- Other freelancers
At Sellential, we offer critical support to a business’s content marketing through the creating of well-researched, high quality, and reader-centric content. We focus on engaging your content creation stage fully so that you can focus on implementing a successful content marketing strategy. Talk to us!
You may also need tools such as podcasting and video equipment, different types of software, etc.
Your Publishing Workflow
The content production process is an important part that most businesses miss.
Content production workflows determine how fast and efficiently the process from creating to publishing and promoting a piece of content goes.
For a typical blog post, here is an example workflow that we use here at Sellential.
- Create and approve a content outline
- Develop/write the content
- Create accompanying graphics/ images
- Send the draft to the editor for proofreading
- Revise as deemed necessary
- Upload and publish the content
- Share it to your audience
Step 8: Create a Content Calendar
Your content strategy is incomplete without a content calendar. You need to know the exact date, and time, for publishing your content.
While you may have done everything right in your content marketing plan, a lack of planning can easily sabotage all your efforts.
Make use of a content calendar to get all your content scheduled. A content calendar may be as simple as outlining publish and promotion dates on Google calendar if you don’t have too much content to publish.
If you manage content teams and are handling large volumes of content, you may need scheduling and task management tools such as ClickUp, Asana, and Coschedule.
Step 9: Creating the Content
After you have done all the groundwork for your content marketing strategy, the next step now is to start creating the content. Whether it is social media content or a blog post, this section will help you get the content done.
You have already done the research and you have an idea of what content you wish to create. (For example, you know that your readers prefer how-tos and list posts.)
Research Your Content
The first step before you start creating your content is doing research for situational awareness.
- Is there similar content out there that’s already been published?
- How will your new content make a difference or add value to your readers?
A quick search on Google will help you in understanding what content is already out there.
Spot opportunities for improving the content and build off from where other content pieces stopped. This strategy is a technique known as the skyscraper technique where your focus is on improving content that has already been published.
Original research also performs well, so make sure to also put out original content if you are collecting the right kind of data.
Your brand’s personality is an important part of the content creation process, and you should work on a strategy of reflecting it all through your content.
You could either be super-professional, casual or strike a balance between both. You also should ensure that your brand’s personality doesn’t come off as patronizing to your readers.
Sprout Social has some great advice on creating consistency in your brand voice.
Ensure that you also take care of SEO and other important ranking factors by optimizing your content.
The 3-D Content Model
This is a popular content creation model that focuses on using 3 individual steps when creating content.
- Map the content to a pain point
- Create the right content for the problem
- Map the content to the buying cycle of the people who have it.
This is a great content creation model as it helps you move the focus from your business to the reader/ audience you want to reach.
Remember that your content has to cater for the right people and address the right problem your product/ services solve. Only then will your crack your content marketing.
Your audience should remain at the centre of your focus and that’s the only way people will pay attention to you.
Step 10: Content Distribution and Marketing
Your content marketing strategy depends heavily on how you share your content with your readers. You won’t get the results you want unless you handle your content distribution and marketing correctly.
Set a schedule for sharing your content on social media immediately after publishing and through a drip campaign.
You can also use email marketing to distribute your content to your email subscribers
Notify anyone you’ve mentioned in your content to help you spread your content to more people.
Step 11: Measuring Results
Yaay! You’ve already published your content and distributed it to the world. The next and final step of your content marketing strategy is measuring the results.
At this point, you will need to go back to the KPIs you set at the start of your content strategy plan.
Check out if anything has changed and how you performed, compared to your goals.
- Use tools such as Google Analytics to get a glimpse of how your content is performing.
- BuzzSumo and other social media analytics tools will help you know how many shares you got.
- You should also check conversion analytics to assess how successful your content marketing campaigns are going.
Tools like AHREFs and SEMRush will help you measure ranking KPIS and search performance.