Are you using content marketing effectively to reach your customers and grow your business? Consistent content creation has continued to prove to be one of the best ways to raise brand awareness among your target audience. Content marketing can also bring you online authority, web traffic, leads, and sales. The best part? Getting started with content marketing is easier than you think!
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing means marketing your business with content. The content portion like blog posts, articles, podcasts, and videos draw in your targeted audiences with information in written, audible, or visual form.
While content marketing is different than traditional advertising in many ways, they both boil down to a simple concept: Telling your target audience about your products and services so they want to become customers. With content creation, you don’t do this with a hard sell and ask right away. You provide value first, provide answers to a customer’s questions, and help them find the information they need to make informed decisions.
Being a content marketer means you create, curate, share and distribute quality content that is relevant, accurate, optimized for search and delivers what your audience wants/needs. This type of content helps marketers:
- Attract a defined target audience
- Inform them about the business
- Engage and educate them
- Generate leads and sales
- Turn that audience into customers, fans, and advocates
The best way to reach people who are always online is with content that comes straight to the mobile devices and social networks they are using. After all, that’s where they’re looking for information, words, and messages they can relate to and can feel a sense of trust and loyalty towards your brand or business. That’s why content is not only a popular marketing tool but an effective one.
To create an effective content strategy, you need to define who you are talking to and what you need to deliver to that audience. Start with these three steps:
1. Know Your Audience
An essential step in any content strategy is knowing who you’re marketing to . This will help you target your content appropriately. This is important because marketing works best when it’s relevant. If you create content for everyone, you’re not creating it for anyone.
A starting point is getting demographic data via the web, social media, and email analytics. This will tell you the age, gender, education, and income of your target audience. You can also collect feedback from customers to help you understand their priorities, decide where to reach them, and flesh out buyer personas. Buyer personas will bring these two sets of information together so you know what content to create, how it will help your audience, and what will make them care about it.
2. Create a Focus
What social media platforms are most relevant to your audience? Where are they spending most of their time online? Do they prefer written blogs? Videos? Webinars?
These are all important questions to answer so you can narrow in on where you should put your content marketing efforts.
For example: If you’re marketing a consumer product, platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be great places to start. However, if you’re in a service-based business, specifically marketing B2B, then you should probably put quite a bit of effort into LinkedIn. Knowing your audience first is critical in being able to determine the overall focus of your content and where you’re going to spend your time and resources.
3. Plan Your Process
It’s essential to plan a process for content creation . In particular, you should know:
- Who’s in charge of creating content
- Who’s in charge of maintaining and updating content
- What resources you need for content creation
- What your publishing schedule is
- Who has final content approval
- What your content production workflow is
If you have the above dialed in, every team member knows what their purpose is when it comes to publishing the final piece of content. Having a focused strategy and way to deliver your content to the right audience is critical.
Getting Started with Content Marketing
Content marketing is becoming a standard practice for just about every business and organization in the market today. It may seem complicated on the outside, but we aim to make content marketing a breeze so you can focus on what matters most to you.
Getting started with content marketing is simple with our process and team. Schedule a free consultation today!
