If you don’t know what content marketing is, you have come to the right place. The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as “focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing positions you as a problem solver for your customers. Instead of seeing you promote your products or services constantly, they see you as someone willing to engage with them about other parts of their lives without the ulterior motive of always getting them to make a purchase. Research shows that all the major brands are using content marketing to great effect, so it’s a creative marketing service you can’t afford to skip.
Crucial Steps for Creating a Content Strategy
If you’re new to content marketing, and even if you’re not, it behooves you to have a firm plan in place before you get started on your exciting ideas. Knowing why, how, and when you will be putting your plans into action will certainly make sure you’re in charge of your content strategy rather than throwing things to the wall and seeing what works.
Establish the Goals of the Campaign
Why are you creating content in the first place? To increase customer conversions? To increase traffic to your website? To establish your brand as a leader in your industry? Decide what your objectives are and how you will measure them – be as specific as possible.
Define Target Audience
The more specific you can be with your target audience, the more successful your content marketing strategy will be. Don’t just stop at surface-level demographics like ages, genders, and locations. What has your audience bought before? What kinds of things do they put into their carts, even if they don’t buy them? What kinds of creators or content do they consume on the internet? The amount of data available to marketers is endless, so take advantage of it. Once you have a good idea of your target audience, define a persona for your typical customer. This persona also should be as specific as possible.
Research Keywords
In order to know what queries people use to find your content, you will need to do keyword research. You can start with keywords that are very likely tied to your content and look at search volumes for those words. You will also find other words and phrases that you didn’t think were relevant to your product but that people use, so you can add those to your strategy as well.
Reuse Popular Content
Why reinvent the wheel when you already have content that works? Find out what types of content are most engaging for your audience and find ways to repurpose them – make podcast episodes or videos into blogs, make blogs into Instagram posts, etc.
Choose a Fitting Platform and Format
It’s impossible to reign over every platform online in every format and do all of them well. Choose one or two platforms your audience responds to best and where you already have a presence that people engage with. And if blogs aren’t working for you, don’t waste time on them! That goes for any type of content that isn’t getting the results you want. Focus your energies on what you do well and what your audience likes.
Analyze and Refine Results
It’s important to be flexible when it comes to content creation, as you may think one thing will work, but it completely falls flat, or the tactic you were sure would lead nowhere actually got a lot of increased traffic. Always monitor your chosen metrics to see what works and what doesn’t, and use that info to refine your content strategy further.
Some Best Practices for Content Marketing
1. Get the proper content support. If you don’t have content creators on staff, it’s a good idea to bring in some specialists or consultants from a creative marketing services agency, at least at first, to give you a leg up on a content strategy from scratch.
2. Create unique content of real value. If you want to be seen as a thought leader in your industry, your content needs to be unique – not something that can be found in other places – and of significant value to your customers. Deep dives into subjects will play better than generic articles with pat advice.
3. Use social proof. People use a brand because others have recommended it to them, so when promoting your products, use customer reviews, testimonials, and UGC (user-generated content) to show customers that they don’t have to take your word for it.
Want to create a content marketing strategy but aren’t sure where to start? Let us help you get started with our creative marketing services!
