Content marketing is the creation of relevant and valuable content to engage your audience and increase your number of clients.
This method of marketing builds a positive perception of your brand while also attracting and involving your target audience, creating more value for your business in the process.
Content marketing is no longer just a market trend, but a strategic investment for businesses to increase their success. With content marketing, brands can gain more relevance and visibility online and become more well-known to their customers.
A business can be more memorable to customers and avoid being lost in the competition by standing out.
Nowadays, it’s not enough to simply be present online. The challenge is to be online in a way that is visible and relevant to your audience. This is the goal of content marketing.
Why use Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is one option for businesses to be online, but there are others. So, why should businesses choose this option?
Content marketing can help to support and complement other digital marketing strategies.
Content is the most important ingredient for your marketing strategy. In fact content is the most important ingredient for any marketing strategy, whether it’s social media, email marketing, or corporate blogging. Without relevant, engaging content, your marketing efforts will fall flat.
Content is the most important aspect according to the leading specialists. You can use it to achieve different objectives, like teaching people how to solve their problems with your product or service.
In order to get people to pick your brand, you have to remember that today people have the power to choose which content they will consume out of the vast sea of information. Give them the best options and they will choose yours.
Which are the benefits of Content Marketing?
In addition to the benefits of content marketing mentioned earlier, this method can also help your business grow in the following ways:
1. Attracts visitors and grows your site traffic
2. Creates value for your audience
3. Engages your audience
4. Generates a positive brand perception
5. Educates the market about your products and services
6. Drives sales to the next level
7. Generates more leads
8. Reduces Customer Acquisition Cost
9. Increases the client’s lifetime value
How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?
How to create and execute a content marketing strategy.
Step 1: Determine Your Audience and the Story You Want to Tell with Your Content
The most important part of your content strategy, or any other marketing strategy, is your target audience.
Your audience is not just composed of people who intend to buy something from you. It also includes people who have just started interacting with your brand.
The content you deliver must be eye-catching and relevant to your potential customers to encourage them to begin the buyer journey.
- First, draw them into the universe your brand has created.
- Then, follow up with content that illuminates how you can be of assistance when they are ready to take action.
Having access to valuable information can help you build a community of brand advocates who will spread the word and strengthen your thought leadership.
People in your target audience that you want to reach with your content are called “reader personas.” The goal is to deliver value to your readers, not to push your products or services.
The “Jobs to Be Done” Framework
The “Jobs to Be Done” framework is a tool that can help you understand your customers’ needs and figure out why they might choose your brand. This framework can help you organize your content marketing strategy from the beginning.
Identify what needs your customer is trying to meet by putting yourself in their shoes.
As the prospect, try to complete the following sentence:
- “When I___” is the problem of your potential customer.
- “That’s why I want ___” is the solution you can offer them.
- “So I can ___”is the prospect’s need (a state or a result they want to achieve).
For example, “I work too much and I want to find a tool to help me manage my time better so I can spend more time with my family.”
If you sell a tool to improve time management, the customer is really buying more time with family.
Remember that your potential customers don’t necessarily want your product or content; they are trying to improve their personal or professional lives by resolving their issues.
After understanding the customer’s current problem, what they need as a solution, and the desired outcome, you can produce content that turns them from new customers into fans of your brand.
Step 2: Analyze Historical Content Performance and Establish Your Content Marketing Goals
Follow this path to establish your content marketing goals:
- Zoom out and think about your company’s high-level business and marketing objectives. For instance, you might want to become a number one solution for improving time management and have a specific marketing revenue goal for this year.
- Consider how content can contribute to these bigger goals, which are usually specific to your business.
- Identify the content marketing metrics that matter to you: What will success look like in numbers? Remember to define a particular success metric for every content piece you are planning to create.
Look at your analytics dashboards to see how well your content has been performing in regards to your goals.
We all have to work with limited resources, so it’s important to be realistic about what you can achieve with the budget and staff you have available. Keep this in mind when setting your goals.
A good tip is to take into account the buyer’s journey when setting goals for your content strategy. For example, in B2B sales, the sales cycle is usually much longer than in B2C. Therefore, using multitouch attribution to analyze your content performance and defining your key performance indicators would be more beneficial.
This step can be completed with the help of some goal-setting frameworks.
Goal-Setting Frameworks
Let’s examine some different ways of setting goals that can help you at this step. You may be more familiar with traditional goal-setting frameworks like SMART goals (goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound), but it’s important to be flexible in order to set achievable benchmarks. You might want to try using the CLEAR framework, which can help you become more agile in a rapidly changing environment.
Your CLEAR objectives are evaluated in terms of their main characteristics:
- Collaborative: Your goals encourage teamwork
- Limited: They are limited in scope and duration
- Emotional: They inspire and motivate your team
- Appreciable: They are broken down into smaller micro-objectives
- Refinable: They can be redefined according to circumstances and needs
Besides, if you find KPIs to be too technical or limited in scope, set OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to make your goals more flexible:
- Set each goal as a challenge
- Define three to four key results by objective
- Measure your goals with a progress indicator of 0-100%
- Make your goals collaborative and transparent
- Assess goals according to new conditions
- Adjust a goal if it becomes irrelevant (even if you didn’t anticipate it)
With this approach, you can target an ambitious goal, but set a minimum threshold for reaching the goal. Progress indicators (0-100%) allow each team member to see how attainable each goal is and understand what remains to be accomplished.
Step 3: Audit Your Existing Content
A content audit is a process of organizing, analyzing, and improving your existing content. It can help you get the most out of your existing pages while potentially saving resources.
To connect with your audience, you must first understand what content interests them and what format they prefer.
Our research indicates that 65% of companies with very successful content marketing in 2021 ran content audits at least twice a year. The main benefits of a content audit include generating more organic traffic, ranking higher, and boosting engagement.
Use the audit to answer the following questions:
- Which content topics and keywords seem to be working best?
- Which formats generate the most engagement and conversions?
- Which channels drive the most traffic?
By using a content audit tool, you can automatically scan your website for content issues. This can help you identify any areas on your site that need improvement.
Step 4: Implement SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Practices
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques used to improve a website’s ranking on search engine page results. Keywords are just one part of the SEO puzzle.
If you are ranked highly on Google, it is more likely that your potential customer will find your blog, follow your marketing path, and make a purchase from you.
You can do this by:
- analyzing your results with Google Analytics to know which posts you could improve;
- using the Google Search Console tool and uploading your site map;
- installing SEO plugins like Yoast if you work with WordPress;
- using keywords that Google suggests in tools like Keyword Planner;
- optimizing the keyword’s use by putting it between the first 100 words and in a subtitle, for example;
- adopting short URLs and using keywords in them;
- optimizing your pages for mobile devices;
- improving your site speed and testing it in Google PageSpeed Insights;
- designing your content using SEO best practices to rank in Google page results;
- using backlinks.
Step 5: Diversify Content Distribution Channels
It’s a way to get your audience to access your content when they are actively searching for a specific topic, or even if they’re not researching yet, they can receive your content passively.
If you want to win coverage, you need to be present on various channels. Some of the most commonly used channels to promote content are listed below.
Social media
By investing in Social media you can reach a large audience and drive blog traffic or increase institutional website traffic.
You can reach millions of people on social media platforms, and it doesn’t cost anything to publish your content, which is why businesses like using social media.
If you want to reach a specific target, you can use Ads campaigns to segment your audience more precisely.
Emails
Email marketing is still going strong and has the best ROI out of all the channels commonly used in content marketing strategies.
It also allows you to create very specific segments and automated campaign flows that provide targeted content.
This channel is also low cost and more likely to reach the target audience.
Instant messengers
Since WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram Messengers became popular, Content Marketers have had another way to reach people.
These apps are becoming increasingly popular among businesses all over the world as a way to connect with their audience.
Step 6: Develop a High-Level Editorial Plan and Content Calendar
Creating a content plan allows you to manage your resources better, see which processes are taking longer than anticipated, and adapt your plans as needed.
Prioritize Your Actions
Efficient planning involves prioritizing tasks in order of importance. By planning your actions, you can identify the most critical tasks or things that you can easily test.
This will protect your strategy from any large scale failures and provide opportunities to test new ideas that could improve your results.
You can choose to prioritize in multiple ways, including:
- Potential gains
- The flow of the campaign you are creating
- What resources you’ll need to create your campaigns
- Product or service launches
After analyzing your data, you can decide which campaigns, topics, and formats to prioritize in your plan.
Step 7: Analyze and Measure Results
It’s important to have content marketing goals that are not only achievable, but also able to be measured. Figure out what data you need to collect to track your progress, and how often you need to collect it.
Every business’s data collection needs differ, but a good place to start is collecting data once a month and adjusting as needed.
It’s also a good idea to pick a few key metrics to watch weekly to ensure you’re staying on target. Possibilities include:
- Website traffic
- Pageviews
- Online and offline sales for both new and existing products
- Email subscriptions
- Blog subscriptions and social media follows
- Blog and social media comments
- Conversion rates
- Social buzz
The metrics you choose should support the main goal of your content marketing.
You should check your data often to see how well you are doing.
After you have completed your research, it is important to discuss your findings with your team or some trusted peers. You may need to change your strategy based on what you have learned.
There are only learning experiences in digital marketing, so keep this in mind when something doesn’t go as planned on the first try.
As your content marketing improves, you’ll find that automating your workflow and adding data makes it possible to do better than your competition. Semrush’s Content Marketing Platform can help you keep up your company’s organic growth.
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