Content marketing is a strategy of creating valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and keep an audience. Content marketing may also drive leads into customers.
Establishing a content marketing strategy is crucial for business success, yet can sometimes seem daunting. Here are a few tips to make the process less daunting.
Audience Research
Identification of one’s target audience is essential to creating successful content marketing. Otherwise, marketers would struggle to produce material that effectively engages its target market or accomplishes their desired goals.
Audience research can use several research methodologies, including surveys, interviews, experiments and observational studies. The choice will depend on your research questions – surveys are often effective tools for gathering quantitative data such as collecting opinions or behaviors; interviews provide qualitative data as well as insights while experiments enable testing variables and comparing outcomes.
Google Analytics, BuzzSumo and Relative Insight are three data analytics tools available for conducting indirect audience research. These tools enable researchers to track user behavior and search trends while simultaneously pinpointing topics, keywords, emotions or grammar that statistically appear more frequently in one data set compared to another; using this knowledge they can tailor content specifically to the needs of their target audience.
Key Performance Indicators
Content marketing strategies cannot be fully realized without setting specific and measurable goals and KPIs for success. From click-through rates on particular articles to how long visitors spend reading them, many metrics exist that can help measure content’s success.
Establish measurable content marketing objectives that align with overall business goals and provide a means of tracking its performance. Setting clear content marketing objectives will allow you to adjust your strategy as needed and increase campaign returns on investments (ROI).
Brand Awareness – Measuring audience familiarity can provide valuable insight into whether or not your content marketing efforts are creating an optimal experience for potential customers. As more of them become aware of you and buy from you, their likelihood to recommend you increases exponentially. Our expert coaching and training programs offer everything you need to craft an impactful content marketing strategy with proven results.
Content Creation
Content marketing strategies centered on producing quality material tailored to the needs and interests of your target audience can increase traffic and conversion rates significantly.
Your content creation process must include an overall strategy and plan that outlines when and what type of content will be created. These considerations could include:
Keyword Research: Deliberately researching your target audience’s search intent and keywords can help you produce content with greater impact. In addition, conducting competitor analysis allows you to see which pieces are working well.
Thought Leadership: Generating content about topics you wish to be known for will position your business as an authority in its field.
Content creation processes depend upon everyone involved being aware of their roles and responsibilities; this helps increase accountability while eliminating duplicate work. Delineating distinct swim lanes will also reduce time taken to complete tasks while guaranteeing quality standards are always upheld.
Content Promotion
Content production doesn’t end when it is finished; to get the maximum benefit from all your hard work in creating it, promotion must take place to reach its audience and help your business meet its goals. Without proper promotion of any ground-breaking pieces you produce, they won’t get the attention they need and might never help achieve their potential.
There are multiple avenues for you to promote your content: social media, paid advertising, email and influencer marketing are just a few ways available to you. The key is knowing which strategies work best with respect to your target audience and goals in mind.
Comment marketing can be an excellent way to reach new audiences and raise awareness, provided it is executed effectively. By having an engaging voice with quality comments, readers will follow your links in search of more of what you have to offer. Content distribution networks also allow you to distribute content elsewhere as long as each placement is clearly marked as such.
