How To Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing helps businesses grow their online presence. This article will talk about the importance and its other aspects to effectively promote your business.
1. Introduction: Content marketing can be a great way to reach your "target audience", but it's not right for every business. Here's a look at some of the factors you should consider before diving in.
"Content marketing is a great" tool for reaching your target audience and for building brand awareness. But, it's not the right choice for every business — not even for the ones that are trying to build a strong foundation of content marketing.
The truth is that if you want to really take advantage of content marketing, you need to think about your goals and what kind of content you want to create. If you're trying to boost sales or "generate leads", then it makes sense to try out different tactics like paid advertising or pay-per-click ads. But if your business has a clear need or goal — one that is easily measurable and can be captured by analytics tools — then content marketing might just be the best way to reach your target audience.
"A business that needs an easy", effective way to communicate its value in order to grow their customer base will find content marketing extremely useful as it enables them to do so quickly and cheaply, allowing them to easily build an active community around their product or service with no additional investment on their part (and instantly improve their bottom line).
And with that in mind, there are a few things you should consider before jumping into content marketing:
1. What kind of content do I want my customers and potential customers seeking? How can I make sure I get it in front of them?
You'll notice that we used "content" in the previous point above (although it could be better: quality vs quantity). Content marketing is all about creating information online — "something people love"! They want answers when they call up a company's website; they want knowledge when they start researching their next car; they want insights when they visit other websites; and so on… Content does not have any inherent value itself; beyond being an interesting source of information. In fact, it can even be useless at times — especially if you don't know how many visitors each one represents or how much time they spend reading (if at all). Therefore, nobody's going anywhere without some kind of metrics in order to measure success (customers who clicked through on landing pages are worth more than those who didn't). And here's where it starts getting tricky: metrics aren't always easy! [Editor’s Note: It might also help if you used analytics tools like "Google Analytics" or MixPanel instead.]
2. How well will this type of content work for my business?
Before deciding what kind of content you'll create based on the needs of your audience, consider
2. What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a new way of marketing and thought about the role of content in a company’s strategy.
It’s not the same as "traditional marketing" — it doesn’t aim to convince potential customers that your product is worth buying. Instead, it aims to attract new customers who aren’t already customers.
This might sound complicated, but it’s actually pretty simple: we need to find people who are not existing customers and bring them into the fold by "creating an engaging story" about what your products can do for them.
The idea behind content marketing is that we can:
• Build an "audience for our company" (not just potential users) by creating engaging content which tells our story about what we do and why we do it, at least partly through our own words (and/or videos).
• Allow our customers to tell their own stories without having to rely on external sources or channels like press releases or blog posts. This keeps us out of the clutches of traditional media (where we might be "outranked by Google") and allows us to reach audiences who might not otherwise have found us.
• Create a buzz around our products through social media — especially on Twitter and Facebook. By doing so, we can get people talking about what's cool about our products, which leads to more product sales for us as well as more opportunities for "referral traffic which generates" even more sales (no one will buy from someone they don't know).
There are two main approaches: I call these strategies “side-stepping the boring stuff” and “making the boring stuff fun." Side-stepping involves writing good stories which engage readers directly; making things interesting first lets readers follow along with your story naturally rather than having them forced into a series of back-and-forth communications with you by your product team, etc. Making things interesting means "writing" in such a way that readers enjoy reading it — like a comic strip or newspaper article! It's hard enough getting people with their attention spans frittered away on status updates on Facebook, why make them have to deal with reading an article too? That's why side-stepping is harder than "making things interesting first" — there usually needs to be some kind of hook or hooky ad copy attached to it (at least until you've got some traction), and you need some kind of structure built into what you write so that readers don
3. Who is your "target audience"?
Content marketing is all over the place these days, and it’s not just big companies where advertising budgets are getting cut. As a result, many small businesses are going to find it hard to make money from their blog or website in the traditional sense.
It’s easy to see why: there isn’t a lot of money in doing something for free — which is the way most people use their "blogs or websites". So when you consider what your audience is willing to pay for, you may find yourself asking: should I pay for content (and therefore create something that people want to read) or should I just create content that people want to read?
And here’s the thing: there really isn’t a right answer. It depends on who your target audience is and what they want, but as long as you have got enough content that appeals to them then it doesn’t matter what you do. Of course, if you are only writing about topics that aren’t relevant then you aren’t going to get many readers anyway.
The question of whether "content marketing works" is really more of a question of strategy — what works best and how can we improve on it? There are some interesting studies which show that offering resources doesn’t increase sales by much; however, if done well enough it can be effective at increasing "engagement with customers and driving sales". That being said, most of us don’t have massive budgets for in-depth research into articles or blog posts. What we do have though is generally enough budget to produce short-form videos (which will give us around an hour or two of screen time per week) and therefore can use an email list as a valuable tool for "generating free (or low cost) traffic" for our website.
There are different ways in which we can "generate free traffic through email lists" — both through direct marketing (e.g., emailing them directly with a link to your website) and through social media (such as Facebook). The trick here is choosing to do one approach more than the other depending on what kind of business you have and what message you want them coming back too.
When using direct marketing there are also few downsides compared with using social media — such as having no control over your own "social media audience" (who may only come back when they like your content), not having control over who sees the ads they receive etc etc…
4. What kind of content will resonate with them?
Some of the best content that drives sales is "generated by marketers" themselves. And when it comes to content, there is a huge difference between what you would consider “content” and “marketing”. Content is written with an eye to generating a response; marketing is written with an eye on getting people to buy.
If you are "a marketer", or just someone who has been in business for a while, there are some things you should be able to guess about the kind of content you might need. You certainly won’t need anything like the kind of detailed "marketing materials" that web "marketers produce" (although I am sure there are niche markets where this is useful). But if you have limited resources and want to stick close to your core competencies, then one approach would be custom-tailored content that helps people make their own choices about products and services.
But if you have the time and resources for both sides of the equation — "marketing and content" — then you are well ahead of the "game". You can take what works in marketing and apply it directly to your customers; or go back to your core competencies (which may not include marketing at all) and make sure they work for your customers as well as they do for yourself.
5. What are your goals for content marketing?
In this post I’ll share with you what I think are the reasons content marketing is a great fit for your business. After that, I’ll do a quick recap of why you should consider it as a component of your overall "marketing strategy".
In the era of digital media, we are seeing more and more interest in content marketing. More than ever before, "businesses are realizing" there is tremendous value in creating relevant, "compelling content" as well as building up their audience with pieces that can be shared and consumed many times over. But what does it mean to build an “audience”?
What do you mean when you say “I want to build an audience?”
If you take any marketer out into the field (and they don’t have Twitter), they will say “I want to get people to like my stuff.” When asked about their goals, most will tell us that they want people to like or share their stuff so that it has a chance at success. But why would someone do something like that? Are people just not interested in your stuff? What if someone were interested enough in your stuff that they were willing to become "customers"? How would you know how much traffic came from readers and how much traffic came from clicks on ads?
These questions aren’t necessarily new: they have been asked since the dawn of business (and certainly before). What has changed is that we now have tools at our disposal (such as Google Analytics) which make it possible for us to answer these questions through "simple data collection" instead of asking random people about what they think about our product or service. If we can pull these stats together, we can see where our efforts have been focused and where we need to spend more time and money on creating better content for "specific audiences". And if we know where those efforts need to be concentrated, we can start laying out some clear strategies for driving increased traffic from social networks and targeted visitors coming from search engines as well as search engine optimization efforts on our own site (e.g., by tagging relevant keywords).
There are three main reasons why companies decide not only to use content marketing but also pay significant sums of money ($$$) towards its creation: 1) They want people who like their business or products/services — but not necessarily people who buy them 2) It's important for them NOT just because there's money in it — but because it'll help them gain visibility 3
6. How much time and resources can you invest in content marketing?
"Content marketing is an investment in your business". It’ll take time to get results, but it’s well worth it.
Building content is a complex endeavor and there are many different ways to do it, which can be confusing to newbies. It may also seem like a daunting task, but the truth of the matter is that there are only so many ways you can write about a topic before you reach diminishing returns.
To put it simply: if you want more readers, you need better writing skills, and that starts with good content. "Content marketing tips" (or “cmo” as they sometimes call them) can be broken down into two categories:
• Microtasks
As we’ve "seen several times in this series", workflow and personal development are critical elements in getting results. If you aren’t using them at all or not consistently (e.g., on social media), then they will slow down your progress quite a bit and make it hard to get results with content marketing (and hence harder to get web traffic). This certainly isn’t intended as an indictment of content marketers who don't use these skills; rather, we'll focus on the reasons why people might have trouble with them here:
• Lack of time
• Lack of focus
In other words: if you can build out a plan for yourself to use multiple tools like one-on-one training and meetups that help you stay on track with your goal(s) then let's do it! There's no better way to learn new skills than from real experts who have already done it or whose own businesses have been successful at doing so! And while these methods are probably not direct ways to "increasing search engine rankings or web traffic", they can still help you build a long-term strategy around your goals that will lead towards those results. Also note that while these strategies seem obvious when applied directly to "SEO/web traffic" – because most people have some idea about what their goals should be – for some reason this strategy is almost universally overlooked by people entering business for the first time. Why? Because no one thinks about the big picture here; when someone says "content marketing" they think "writing blog posts". That may sound like common sense in theory but when done poorly… well… let's just say it's not common knowledge yet 🙂
7. Conclusion: Weighing the pros and cons of content marketing can help you decide if it's the right strategy for your business.
Content marketing has been around for a while, but it has been slowly gaining momentum in the last decade. There are some really great reasons to consider it (e.g., optimizing for search engine optimization, increasing social media engagement, etc).
There are also some really bad reasons to consider it (e.g., getting your product in front of a large audience that is not interested in your product), and this post will cover the benefits and drawbacks of content marketing across a number of different types of business.
While "content marketing is an important part of any business" right now, it should not be the only strategy you use — no more than advertising is.
More info: Content Marketing.
