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More and more businesses are turning to content marketing to drive traffic to their websites, boost leads, and improve brand perception.
What many companies fail to do is plan how they will achieve these goals using content. A good content strategy includes who you want to target, ideas for content, how you will produce content, and a timeline.
Content marketing can be defined as “a consistent and focused approach to producing and publishing relevant content”.
The heart of content marketing is allowing people to discover your business through different means and products. Then, giving them reason(s) to choose your business over others is the goal of content marketing.
It also helps if you have an original angle or theme that sets you apart from the crowd. Content is something that strikes a personal chord with consumers, so it helps if you share other peoples’ stories and give some meat to the data points in your campaigns.
Feedback from customers is one of the most important aspects of content marketing. To make sure that you are not wasting resources and time, it’s essential to know whether or not your efforts are paying off.
Customer feedback can take many forms, such as:
How could we improve this product?
What message has he tried again and again?
He believes “X” to be true, why don’t you believe me?
These questions are crucial to helping you determine what works and what doesn’t. Once you have enough data, created materials, or trends, then you can start using content promotion software, like HubSpot’s Promote app, to promote different products and services.
It’s hard to achieve success with content marketing if you don’t have a plan. You can have the best products or services in the world, but people will not buy them unless they know about them.
That is why we created Content Marketing Strategy — to help businesses develop and execute effective content marketing campaigns that attract targeted customers and lead to sales.
Our team of marketing experts will work with you to determine what goals you want to accomplish through content marketing, then create an entire campaign designed to grow your business via blogs, social media, videos, infographics, podcasts and more.
Content marketing is much simpler than trying to sell a product or service directly to the consumer. That is where marketing professionals get into trouble.
You need to employ others to write quality content, obtain endorsements from other companies, and strategize how to promote this content without coming off as spammy.
Your goal should be to produce high-quality content that offers value to the person who reads it. If you do that, sometimes things will fall into place.
Sometimes things just happen naturally. People are hungry for relevant information, and good content marketers are those able to provide it.
It’s easy to put off creating a content marketing plan, but without one you are missing out on an important tool for effective blogging and publishing.
A content marketing plan can help you organize your thoughts about how you will achieve results from your content efforts. It can also be helpful when it comes to deciding what content you want to produce going forward.
This guide is designed to help you create or update a content marketing strategy. Let’s get started!
Companies that don’t have a content marketing plan are getting left in the dust. According to a survey by The Conference Board, 93% of businesses with content published online had a strategy for creating and spreading quality content. But only 48% of those brands had a strategic approach to social media management to support their content campaigns.
You need people to believe in what you offer and be inspired by your brand or product messages. Only then will they take action and trust you enough to give them something for free!
Your customers also want to feel confident that what they read is professional and makes sense. They want to feel like they can ask questions and you’re willing to help them understand how it all works.
Content creation takes work but it’s definitely worth it. Between blogging, social media, emails, advertising-you name it; there are ways to create content across various channels.
The more consistent you are, the better.
Goals help you know what to aim for when marketing your content. They can be as simple as, “100 people will read this article,” or “We’ll grow our Facebook fan page by 100 members.”
You can use any number of goal setting techniques. Some ways to set goals include:
Having an internal contest within your team to come up with new ideas; have fun creating milestones for each idea; keep working until you get one right.
Others may feel that it helps to have external advisors who can give you more advice than just yourself.
Getting feedback from others in your community is helpful too, because then you can ask them how they did it and maybe other things too.
Data helps you figure out where to put your resources and efforts to best produce results. Data can also help you measure whether or not your spending money on advertising is worth it.
It gives you an objective way to see if everything you do is successful or not.
Internal competition is good for you because you want everyone competing against their own limits. Having goals that are outside of your limit is better for motivation.
Strategic planning is important when it comes to content marketing. Without a strategic plan, you could be wasting money and resources if you publish content that does not serve their own company’s goals.
It can help to think about what other companies are doing in terms of content production. By examining how others have tackled similar problems, you can get some ideas for what works for them, and what doesn’t.
You can also see where they spend their time and efforts. Are they active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+?, and YouTube? Or do they create articles and posts that capture people’s attention and motivate them to move through a sales funnel?
Content promotion is key, but it should never take place without proper promotional support. You want customers to trust you enough to buy from you, so raising awareness of your business is always a good thing.
Trusted businesses develop a long list of loyal clients who depend on them for quality goods and services. What is more, by having an extensive knowledge of these industries, they become an expert at identifying potential changes and improvements that will better suit their customer’s needs.
By promoting your business through interesting blogs and videos, you are bringing in new traffic into your website, which is a crucial component to start a successful online business.
There are many ways to organize how you want your content marketing strategy to play out. For our guide, we’re going to use an overview of the steps above plus some added extras :
We’ve written about choosing between website templates, have researched keyword tools and content planning apps. So after getting organized, the next step is to write down all the topics you need to cover and what will be included with each topic.
Content promotion is a significant part of successful campaigns. You need to put thought into how you’ll promote your content once you finish producing it.
For instance, if you've got a blog post that relates to putting together another piece of content, then let people know where they can find it. This could be via social media, flyers, mailers or tweets.
The goal is to attract readers and fans who will hopefully keep coming back for more. Your first couple of posts may even become best-sellingers!
Social media has helped make connecting with others easy, so why not take advantage of that and connect your followers with other sources? A few well-placed hashtags can help get your content viewed by more people.
You can also send emails occasionally to stay updated on current events and tips articles, provide reminders, introduce new products and services, or simply thank people for their time spent on Facebook.
“Results” are what you get when you do something. If you plan to grow your business through content marketing, your outcomes may include more traffic to your site, sales or leads, or other measures of return on investment.
How will you measure these results? By tracking numbers of visitors to your website, how often they visit, where they came from, and whether or not they made a purchase or signed up for a newsletter.
You can also track clicks and conversions done via email. Whether doing so online or using a software program, record every time someone click onto one of your links.
Also track whatever error rates there are in measuring returns. For example, if you have one piece of landing page code that produces 20 orders at twice the rate as another piece, then opt for the latter.
