Content Marketing Made Simple: A Complete Guide

People are no longer impressed or attracted to the traditional content that mainly revolves around the sole purpose of promoting companies’ products and services. They need actual content that addresses real-life experiences and topics.

Content marketing provides business owners with a golden opportunity to gain customers’ trust and loyalty, and subsequently increase profits. By providing current and potential customers with tailored content that is valuable and consistent; content that will appeal to their interests and satisfy their needs.

Before we discuss how to master content marketing, let’s go over some basics.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing strategy focused on creating and publishing valuable, relevant, and informative content to attract and retain a clearly defined target audience in order to drive results. Successful content marketing can help you to achieve the following results:

• Drive traffic and conversions

• Build solid relationships with your current and potential customers, which will boost brand loyalty.

• Improve brand awareness

• And of course, increase revenue!

You must develop a good content marketing strategy, that will help you achieve these goals. To define your strategy, you need to answer the following questions:

Who Is Your Audience?

You need to define your target customers; what are their needs, what are they looking for in your brand, and what communication channels do they prefer?

To specifically define your audience, you need to collect the following demographic data:

• Age

• Gender

• Level of education,

• Social class (income)

Such data can be collected using web analytics, social analytics, and e-mail subscriber analytics. Google Analytics can also help you to get an insight into their purchase habits. By uncovering this data, you will be able to create customer-tailored content.

You can also ask for feedback. You can ask your audience about their preferences, interests, and opinions on your current content; that will give you a more in-depth insight about them.

What Do You Want to Achieve?

Your content marketing strategy should be goal-oriented. Do you want your strategy to help improve brand loyalty and awareness, drive more traffic to your website, or increase profits? Your content must be designed to accomplish your goals. Setting specific goals will help you measure the success of your strategy in later stages and to adjust it accordingly.

How to Measure Your Strategy Success?

You need to have clear and specifically defined key performance indicators (KPIs), to measure the success of your content marketing strategy and make amendments in case your goals have not been met. The type of indicators you rely on depends on your goals, if your goal is to increase your revenues then the profit you made through your content is a good indicator. The number of returning customers, reviews, and referrals are good performance indicators for improving brand loyalty.

Where Will You Publish Your Content?

Now that you have your content ready, it’s time to figure out how do you plan to deliver this content to your potential customers. As you study your target audience you will get a sense of where you have more online presence. Use these content promotion strategies to get your content noticed and shared.

What Type of Content Will You Publish?

Now that you have clearly defined your audience and goals, you need to decide the type of content you want to create, you can choose from various content types, including:

• Blog Posts: Blog posts are great to discuss common subjects and address issues customers face in your industry and how your products and services will help to resolve them.

• Infographics: infographics are a good choice to present information in a fun and easy way that would grab your customers’ attention.

• Case Studies: a case study discusses an issue a customer faced and how the company’s services and products helped in resolving the issue and satisfied the customer’s needs.

• Videos: This might be one of the most popular types of content. Videos can easily grab the attention of people from different age groups and with different interests. You can use videos to introduce your business and explain how your products and services can benefit customers.

• Images: Images can easily appeal to customers and are more likely to be shared on social media platforms.

These are the most common types of content. E-books, presentations, reports, and research are also some examples of the content you can create. Again, the type of content you choose depends mostly on your target audience’s needs and your goals.

How Will You Track Your Content Production?

You need to have a clear idea of what you will publish, when you want to publish it, and how many new pieces of content you will publish each day, week, or month (frequency). The lack of planning can lead to disastrous results.

To do so, it will be helpful to have a content calendar. It will keep the content production on track and your content team will be well-informed on what and when content will be published.

The following must also be addressed to create consistent and valuable content:

• Content buckets (a list of topics and content categories that are significant to your business and your potential customers

• Brand standards (style guide)

• Content rules (dos and don’ts)

• SEO considerations and strategy guides for content writers