What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is really important if you want to drive traffic to your website and encourage customer action. It involves setting up a marketing strategy with your team. This strategy will decide how the creation and distribution of content, that is both valued and relevant aimed at your target audience will be planned. Think of it as a long-term strategy that aims to build credibility with your target audience by providing informative, engaging and high-quality content that helps them make informed decisions.
This will ultimately lead to establishing your brand as a thought leader and build a loyal following that will drive more traffic and sales to your website.
Where to Start with Content Marketing?
When choosing what content marketing strategy to follow these 6 tips should help you realise a successful content marketing strategy.
1. Who will you be creating your content for?
Before you start creating content you need to decide you will be creating content for. In other words, the target audience that you need to reach and communicate with. Finding your target audience is not any easy task but it is essential to ensure that your content hits the mark.
You can ask the following questions to define your target audience and better understand them:
- What is their average age?
- Are they male, female, LGBT?
- What are their interests and hobbies?
- Where do they live or in what location are, they generally found?
- What are their goals, aspirations, job?
2. What do you want to achieve through your content marketing strategy?
Deciding what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy involves setting clear goals and objectives.
Firstly, the goals you set might involve driving traffic to your website, create new leads, build followers on social media, or increase sales. The goals you choose will be personal to your business and reflect your overall business goals. Once you have decided what goals you have want to achieve you need to give each goal a specific objective which should always be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). For example, if your goal is to increase traffic to your website then your SMART objective to achieve this goal would be “to increase organic traffic to website by 10% in 6 months to October.”
3. How will you implement your Content Marketing Strategy?
Plan a roadmap as to how you will realise your content marketing strategy. Firstly, decide who will write the content – will it be one of your team members or will you outsource. Include what types of content you will have to create. Secondly, plan where you will publish your newly created content. Decide which channels would be most effective in reaching your target audience. And lastly, decide when, how often and how you will measure the success of your content marketing as well as what budget you will allocate to implementing your content strategy.
4. What types of high-quality content should you create?
Now that you have a content marketing strategy mapped out, you need to create high-quality content that is informative, engaging, and valuable to your target audience. Content created to reach these new audiences should solve a problem, discuss a solution or both so that you can build credibility.
A range of different content types should also be created that match your different customer personas. For instance, some new audiences may use Tik Tok while other audiences prefer a Podcast, or You Tube video. The content created to meet the preferences of all these users will have different formats and need to create in different ways. Hence, it is important to create many types of content such as videos, blog posts, case studies, Podcasts as well as content for social media channels where visuals play a big role.
Note that it is vital that you keep the same brand tone throughout your content channels, this includes your website, social media, blogs, and email marketing.
5. How should you promote your content?
Creating lots of high-quality content is the first part of the plan, the second part is where and how you promote it so that it reaches your target audience. Using social media channels has become a must in the digital marketing realm. Social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are all great ways to share your content with your followers. You could also use email marketing to promote your content to current subscribers with links to blog posts. Another consideration is using paid advertising on social media platforms and search engines to reach a wider audience.
6. How will you measure your content strategy?
To measure your content strategy, use analytics tools such as Google Analytics to track your content’s performance and measure its impact on your goals and objectives. Identify which types of content performs best, which channels drive the most traffic, and which metrics are most important to your business. Use this data to optimize your content strategy and make informed decisions about future content creation and distribution.
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