What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic process that includes activities like Content Planning, Content Creation, Publishing Content, Content Distribution, and tracking Content Performance to drive monetary traffic and build the brand image.
In Content marketing, it is expected from marketers to create an agile Content Framework that produces effective content consistently and allows them to repurpose content that audience and search engines love.
Thus, Content marketing is not a single set of activities. It is a group of actions when performed in sync that helps drive Brand Awareness, builds trust with the audience, and generates traffic and earnings.
Why is Content Marketing Important?
While you are reading this, thousands of users have tweeted, Google has answered missions of search queries, and millions of web pages are published.
There is too much content available today, and thus it gets crucial to distribute and market your content to the right audience so that they can consume it. Content Marketing hence gets vital here.
Content marketing allows you to educate your target audience about your product or service.
For example, if you are a Product based company, Content marketing will help you to educate your target audience about the benefits of your using product.
Content marketing helps you to build brand trust and relationships. Educating your audience using Content marketing helps in increasing brand awareness as you give your audience the information they are looking for.
Once you can connect with your audience, they convert to loyal customers, and then driving traffic and sales is not difficult.
A good example is the SEMRush blog. SEMrush publishes blog posts that explain the importance of using Semrush tools for Keyword analysis, Content marketing, and much more.
With their blog posts, social media channels, and paid ads, SEMrush builds a band and earns loyalty from the audience. When the same audience turns a Customer, SEMrush drives sales.
Thus, for a business, Content marketing helps improve Brand awareness, boost sales, build trust with the audience, and allows you to target and re-target the audience for engagement and sales.
Such ROI is only possible by implementing an effective Content Marketing Strategy.
Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy refers to the set of activities you perform to achieve your Content Marketing goals. A Content strategy depicts who you are and revolves around the product or service you deliver in your niche.
For example, SEMrush can have a content marketing strategy build around the SEO tool they offer
There can be various Content marketing strategies. Let’s try to understand in general what an effective Content Marketing strategy consists of.
A Content marketing strategy can have the following steps to ensure your content marketing efforts give you desired results.
Setting up SMART Goals
You should start your Content Marketing Journey by setting up your SMART goals. These goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.
For example, your SMART Goals could be –
- Increase Conversions and Boost Revenue
- Improve Brand Loyalty
- Collaborate with Strategic Partners
Produce Content that aligns with your SMART Goals
Next, decide on the type of content you want to create. For this, you need to understand your target audience and their buyer personas – i.e., what kind of information your audience is looking for.
For example, if your audience is looking for a video, then a Blog Post might be of lesser use.
Also, it may be worthy of revisiting your old content and updating it to make sure it is innovative and engaging for your customers and delivers the information they are looking for
Determine KPIs for your Content Performance
Decide upon measurable and objective KPIs or data points that can help you measure your Content Performance so that you can accordingly upgrade or re-engineer your Content Marketing Strategy.
- For example, To boost Revenue, my KPIs will be site traffic or daily sales.
- For Strategic Alliance, my KPI will be the number of Backlinks my website gains.
- For Brand Loyalty, my KPI could be returning customers.
Choose the right Channels for Content Distribution
Next is to find out where your target audience is or where you are getting maximum searches.
Thus, starting a successful blog is one of the Content Marketing channels.
One could be a YouTube channel to distribute your content. Indeed, you have a whole lot of Social Media options.
Create and Distribute Content
Create content so that your buyers or target audience can consume it, and you get the right traffic, attention, conversion – whatever is your KPI, you should get the desired result.
Monitor your Brand
Check for Social Listening. See what your existing customers, audience, or readers are talking about you. Is there something you want to fix immediately – well, this should be a priority then for you.
Analyze the results
Once you have distributed content on various channels, check if your metrics are improving.
- Are you getting a conversion?
- Has your brand royalty increased?
- Are you gaining backlinks?