Content marketing is known by many names such as inbound
marketing, corporate journalism, branded media, native advertising, and
customer publishing to name a few. However, the basic idea behind the strategy
remains the same, i.e., to create and distribute content that engages and
attracts a targeted audience, while encouraging them to take action which is
profitable to a business.
Content Marketing in Two Steps
- Attract the attention of target customers using relevant, useful & quality content.
- Use that attention to convert prospects into customers through interest, desire and action.
two major parts Attracting Attention & Conversion.
Part 1: Attracting Attention
- Identify your target market, know what your target market wants to learn or read about
- Create content and publish them in different formats, promote your content to reach your prospects
Part 2: Conversion (Interest, Desire and Action)
- Convert your first time visitors into leads (interest generation)
- Generating Leads
- Different Types of Leads
- Lead Scoring and Segmentation
- Nurture your Leads (intensifying desire)
- Drip Email Marketing (visit https://youtu.be/5KAnqy5YOeI)
- Content Marketing for Existing Leads
- Convert Leads into Customers (triggering action)
- Sales Pages, Landing Pages & Copy writing
- Inside Sales
What is the Use of Content Marketing?
The growth of the World Wide Web, social networks, and mobile
technologies has changed the relationship between consumers and businesses.
Average consumers today don’t buy a product just by passively watching its
advertisement on a billboard. They research on Google to compare similar
products, read the product’s review online by experts, and even ask their
friends on social networks, before spending their money.
As a result, businesses need to rethink their traditional
marketing strategies and channels if they want to earn the trust of their
customers and influence their buying decisions. This is where content marketing
plays an important role. It helps businesses to attract potential consumers’
attention towards their products by highlighting and promoting their key
features.
Content Marketing Strategy
Before you create a content marketing strategy for your business,
you need to define the goals first. What are you trying to achieve with your
content? Is it more subscribers to your blog? Or is it traffic acquisition? Or
maybe, you want certain sales pages of your website to convert? Whatever they
are, you need to clearly list the goals before you even begin laying down the
strategy.
That being said, there are certain overarching elements to a
content marketing strategy which are the same, regardless of your goals. They
are listed in brief below, as we will look into them in detail later in this
tutorial:
- Understanding
your customers
- Building
your brand message or story
- Defining
the content you want to create
- Measuring
the success of your content marketing efforts
(1) Content Marketing -
Target Customer :
Identifying your target
audience is the easy part. What is more challenging for a business is to
understand the pain points of its customers. Once you grasp the problems of
your consumers and understand their requirements, you would be able to come up
with perfect solutions to cater to those particular requirements.
When you want to create a content marketing strategy, finding out
about your audiences and their needs is the most important task. But how do you
make sure that you have penned down the real problems of your customers and not
just imagined them? You can do this by following the four steps mentioned
below:
List Your Primary Customers
To accurately list your primary customers, give them specific
names and identities. For instance, if you run a travel company, your audiences
might fall under: experienced travelers, occasional travelers, tourists
visiting a city, local residents touring the city, etc.
Collect Information about Your
Customers
You can collect information about your major customers in a number
of ways such as:
- Conduct
a survey of customers visiting your site
- Ask
your customer service for the questions customers are asking
- Read
the emails and feedback of customers on your Contact or Help page
Identify the
Characteristics of Your Primary Customers
Identifying the characteristics of your primary customers means
learning about your customers’ experiences. For example, experienced travelers
might know about airport codes and e-tickets but occasional travelers might
not. Such well-rounded information helps you to build content that caters to
each and every customer’s needs.
Create Personas
The best way to visualize and understand a customer‘s needs is to
create personas. While creating personas, give specific details to a customer,
for instance:
- Assign
a name - John
- Age
- 45 years old
- Profession
- Senior IT manager
- Web
tasks - Reads technology news daily, books travel tickets, buys things on
weekends, etc.
(2)Content Marketing - Content
Creation:
Marketing gurus and pundits have often repeated the line that it’s
the company that tells a better story wins and not the company which is bigger
in size. This truism is even more relevant today with the growth of new forms
of online media, which have empowered consumers like never before.
However, the question still remains largely unanswered. How do you
tell a better story? Do you create a 10x10 feet poster, listing out the
features of your product, and stick it on every billboard in town or do you
create a swanky television advertisement? Which is the option that will give
you more business and more revenue? Well, to be honest, building a good story
and creating great content requires much more than that. It requires you to
answer the 3Ws: who, what, and why.
To create a great story around your business, you need to clearly
answer the following:
Why are You Creating the Content?
Defining your content goals is the first step.
- Why
do you want to create a specific type of content?
- What
is it that you want to accomplish?
- Does
the content strategy match your overall business goals?
These are important questions that need to be answered.
Who are Your Customers?
It goes without saying that identifying your customers is the most
important step of content marketing. You can refer to Part 2 of this tutorial
to learn how to identify your customers. The bottom line is to list out the
problems and preferences of your audience and figure out what kinds of content
will they like best. Also, you need to answer the important question - what is the unique thing
that you have to offer to you customers?
What do You Want Your Content to
Achieve?
You must ask yourself - how will my content help my customers?
Will it help them to arrange a travel, buy a house, or train for an
examination? You need to clearly define and understand how your content will
affect the lives of your customers?
(3)Content Marketing -
Media Channels:
By media channels, we mean the platform you decide to use in order
to market your content. This is an important step of your overall content
marketing strategy because the channel also determines what content you must
create. For instance, if the channel is a blog, then the content you can create
are feature stories, product announcements, etc. Similarly, if it’s your
website’s Facebook Page, then the content can be images, status messages,
weblinks, etc.
There are three major strategies that you must consider while
defining your media channels:
Analysis of Your Situation
The first thing to do is to understand what existing channels do
you have and which new ones you need or want.
- Do
you already have a Facebook Page for your website?
- Do
you need to develop a separate blog?
- Will
it help in telling your story effectively to your customers?
The information about your customers and the story you want to
tell are both crucial in deciding what media channels you want. It also depends
on your budget and bandwidth.
Your Channel Objectives :
Now that you have a fair idea of your situation, you need to map
the objectives of your channels. For instance, depending on the story you want
to tell and your content marketing goals, you might decide that a blog would be
the best channel. So your channel’s primary objective would be to get more
subscribers to your blog, which will generate leads for your sales.
Content Plan for Your Channel:
This is the part where you bring together your channel objectives
and your content plan. Taking the above example, the primary objective of your
blog is to get more subscribers, which brings in more leads. To achieve this,
you might decide to write a couple of articles and club them together as an
ebook, which you can then provide for free to new subscribers. However, before
you decide the right content for your channel, you also need to consider the
different personas of your customers.
(4)Content Marketing -
Editorial Calendar
Content marketing is a long-term strategy and an editorial
calendar helps you plan your strategy in an organized fashion. The calendar
will contain details such as −
· List of
the kinds of content you have or need to create, including the dates when they
will be created and published
· The
names of the content editors/producers and other stakeholders who are
responsible for the project
· The
media channel that you will use to market your content
· Metadata
such as your primary target audience, SEO keywords, call to action, etc.
How to Build an Editorial Calendar
While you can use a simple tool such as an Excel or Google sheet
to create an editorial calendar, you can also use web-based software offered by
companies such as HubSpot, Skyword, etc.
(5) Content Marketing -
Style Guide:
A content
marketing style guide is a document which standardizes your content creation
guidelines. From the colors of your brand, the key phrases you use for call to
action buttons to the spelling and punctuation usages, everything is documented
and standardized by a style guide.
A style
guide is a necessary document for the success of your content marketing
strategy as well as to maintain quality of the content across your website. A
style guide can list step-by-step rules for:
· A
designer’s checklist - This
will remind designers of your brand colors, correct image properties and
copyright issues, icon selection, etc.
· A
writer’s checklist - This
will remind writers of the use of voice, spelling, punctuation, unique words,
and phrases approved by the company. It will also advise writes on legal fact
checking and proofreading methods.
(6) Content Marketing -
Basic Tools:
Content Marketing tools come in different shapes and sizes. What
will work for you is totally dependent on your business requirements and the
scope of your content marketing strategy. The tools listed below cover the
three central aspects of content creation, management, and optimization.
Content Creation and Publishing Tools
These tools will help you create a website from scratch, build
your blog, and send emails to your subscribers and publish almost any kind of
content. Known as content management tools, these range from the simple and
free ones such as Wordpress and Drupal to the paid ones such as Sitecore and Tridion.
Conversion and Data Capture Tools
What these tools do is allow you to build online registration
forms and surveys for your key landing pages. They capture data of customers
visiting these landing pages, which can be integrated with sales tools like
Salesforce.com. Examples include Wufoo, Equola, Manticore, etc.
Content Optimization Tools
These are tools that help you to deliver specific content to
targeted customers. Once users come to your website and identify themselves,
these tools push content which are relevant to these users.
For instance, let’s say you own a travel website and a user comes
and identifies himself as a tourist looking for cars in the city, now these
tools will filter your content and provide the user only the relevant
information, while hiding the irrelevant ones. Examples of such tools include
Google Website Optimizer, Adobe Omniture, Autonomy Optimost, etc.
Social Media Management and Listening
Tools
These tools are excellent for managing and tracking the content
for your social channels such as Facebook ad Twitter. One of the most
frequently used tools is Hootsuite, which allows you to centrally
schedule your social media posts. For Twitter, you can use Tweetdeck and for further analysis, you can grab
tools like Radian6 and Sysomos.
(7) Content Marketing - Challenges
Developing the perfect content marketing strategy for your
business is not easy. You have to accurately identify your target customers and
understand their problems. You have to define your media channels and build
editorial style guides. You have to make sure that your story will resonate
with your audience without misleading them.
However, even after you’ve managed to bring all the pieces of your
strategy together, three crucial challenges still remain −
- Creating
engaging content
- Creating
enough content
- Finding
the budget to create the content
Let’s look at some of the ways in which you can solve these
problems:
Research, Research, and Research
The first rule of creating engaging content that’s right for your
audience is by way of research.
- Don’t
assume that you know exactly what kind of content your customers will like
or need.
- Do
some market research to find out what your competitors are doing.
- Gather
feedback from your customers.
- Look
at data and analytics of your website’s traffic.
- Test
your webpages and email campaigns.
The bottom line is to not regard yourself as an expert but a
learner of the art of content marketing.
Resist Content Overkill
As in life, where you will not always make the correct decisions;
not every content piece you create will do well either. Your webpages might see
fantastic traffic but your blog might not be getting as many subscribers as you
hoped it would.
- Don’t
panic and start spamming your blog with one article after another.
- Instead,
spend time on producing quality content that is a clear reflection of your
brand message and story.
The trick is not to produce a ton of random content but
well-researched content that will offer lasting value to your customers.
Define Your Content Budget
Once you understand what kinds of content you will create, find
out how much of it is one-time content such as a webpage and how much of it
is ongoing
content such as blog
articles.
This will give you a fair idea of how much you need to spend on
creating content. Then you can decide whether you want to build an in-house
content team or want to rope in freelancers. However, make sure you hire the
right persons. For instance, someone with a journalistic background will be
able to write you the best blogposts, while a copywriter will pen down the
perfect call to action content for your webpages.
(8) What is Blog?
A blog is an excellent tool for creating and publishing content.
It can be your website’s home base or a hub for your content, where you can
write posts such as product announcements, service guides, thought leadership
articles, press announcements, and more. It is basically a platform for you to
share your ideas and thoughts with the world.
How a Blog Works
There are certain basic rules that you need to follow, especially
if you are writing a business blog:
· Know
your audience and keep in mind the goals you’re trying to achieve through your
blog. Track if these goals are being met via Google or your custom analytics
tool.
· Write
down killer headlines which will improve the open-rate of your blogposts,
especially if you are marketing it via Enewsletters or life-cycle emails.
· Design
your blog so that it not only looks beautiful but helps your customers to
easily find items such as the RSS subscription icon, a search box, your contact
information, and social sharing icons.
· Make
sure that you have categorized your topics well. Add relevant keywords and tags
to your topics so that customers can easily find the blogposts.
· Keep an
eye out for spam comments and enable the comment moderation feature which
allows you to filter spams.
Benefits of Maintaining a Blog
A blog is primarily a community-building tool, a place for
generating leads based on new subscriptions, which might also directly or
indirectly lead to a sale. It is also an excellent tool for content
maximization, for instance, let’s say you have created a new video tutorial for
your customers, which you’ve published on your website and on YouTube. Now, you
create a blogpost for the same and market this video on your blog. Most
importantly, your blog helps to nurture good relations with your customers and
retain them longer.
(9)What are
eNewsletters?
Like lifecycle emails, eNewsletters are also permission-based
emails that offer value to your customers. When your customers sign-up for your
product or service, you can prompt them for these eNewsletters' subscriptions.
eNewsletters are typically distributed weekly or monthly, the
distribution of lifecycle emails can vary according to your campaign.
How do eNewsletters Work?
eNewsletters are emails you send out to both existing and new
customers. The emails can contain information about your product, service, or
even company-related information. You can include full-length articles or short
image-based content, which links out to some specific landing pages of your
website.
Benefits of eNewsletters
An eNewsletters is a promotional tool for your content. For
instance, you can email your customers a new whitepaper, an ebook, a webinar,
or a video that you have recently created. You can also create aggregated
content such as a round-up of all your blogposts for a particular month and
send it out as an eNewsletters to your customers.
(10)What is an eBook?
An ebook is like a whitepaper but it is more informal, loose, and
more playful. The language used is more everyday talk and is designed in a
visual manner. The content must be entertaining and easily consumable with bold
headlines, callouts, and bulleted lists.
· An ebook
is written in a very concise style keeping in mind that readers skim and skip.
· The
content is highly-visual and the ideas and concepts an ebook contains have to
be interesting and preferably those that are trending and current.
Benefits of Using eBooks
Ebooks are awesome because they can bring your website traffic and
generate more leads. You can market free ebooks, as an incentive for new
customers to subscribe. When they land on a specific page of your website, you
can prompt them to collect their free ebook. You can also market these ebooks
via email campaigns. However, make sure that you add clear call to action
buttons in your ebooks so that readers are directed to your key pages.
(11) What is a Digital Magazine?
A digital magazine is a periodical, which is something in between
a PDF and a traditional magazine. It can be a fortnightly or monthly magazine
containing a variety of content from articles, videos, podcasts, and more.
A digital magazine is an awesome tool for presenting a ton of content
that you already have but don’t want to host on your main website. For
instance, you can create a digital magazine consisting of infographics,
podcasts, videos, etc. You might not want this content to be an integral part
of your website, but you still want them as they serve a specific purpose such
as capturing long-tail SEO keywords that your website’s content doesn’t.
Benefits of Using Digital Magazines
Digital magazines can become a great hub for your content. For
instance, you can create content around certain keywords and host them in your
digital magazine. It is also an excellent platform for integrating all your
offline content such as brochures, books, etc. and giving them an online
presence.
(12)What are
Infographics?
Almost every business today creates a video or infographics as
part of their content marketing program. In a business context, you can use
videos to give customers a guided tour of your product or service. With
infographics, you can help your customers understand a specific problem that
you solve for them.
However, the use of videos and infographics are not limited to
product tutorials and guides. With the unprecedented growth of video sites like
YouTube and Vimeo and infographic sites like Listly, you can use videos and
infographics to create brand awareness, generate sales leads and establish
yourself as a thought leader in the industry.
Tips to Create a Good Infographic
Contrary to popular belief, it is not an expensive affair to
create a decent video or an infographic. However, the focus must not be solely
on creating content that goes viral but content that tells a story that your
customers will find interesting.
· Even if
it’s about your product or service, it doesn’t have to be overtly serious.
Create video or infographics that entertain, while at the same time, educate
your customers.
· List out
what your video or infographic will feature. Will it tell a real story of only
your company or include your clients, vendors, customers, etc.?
· In the
case of a video, the first part is to create an excellent script. The second
part includes the voice-over and visuals. Hire professionals to do these jobs
for you.
· Though
many infographics include data and statistics, a great infographic has to do
much more. That is, it has to provide insights into the data and show how all
the information adds up.
Benefits of Using Infographics
To say that videos and infographics are a great addition to your
content marketing strategy would be an understatement. They are very essential,
as they have massive reach, owing to their visual nature and potential to go
viral.
Since Google today has a blended search approach, your videos and
infographics can improve your Google rankings and bring in more traffic to your
website.
(13)What are Articles?
Whether they be the good old long-copy feature articles or the
new-fangled, instruction based, step-by-step how-to ones, articles are
essential to the success of your content marketing strategy. You can use
articles to
- Discuss
industry trends
- Offer
solutions to typical concerns of customers
- start
a discussion
How to Use Articles
Creating articles is the best way for your business to directly
address the concerns of your audience. However, creating a single article is
not going to help. You need to create an article campaign for which you need to
include your SEO team and create a keyword campaign. Based on this and other
accompanying research such as competitor and market analysis, you can create
well-informed articles, which speak to your readers.
Benefits of Using Articles
Though it is regarded that online readers do not like reading long
copy, however, creating high quality articles and publishing them in top tier
sites like Washington Post, Mashable, Huffington Post can drive huge traffic to
your website and grow your list of subscribers and sales leads. Again,
publishing thought-leadership pieces on your community blog can attract
potential customers as well as people who can influence your customers buying
decisions such as industry experts.
(14)How to Use Social
Media Channels
Social media promotion has become an essential part of any content
marketing strategy today. This includes B2B and B2C marketing aspects and
covers different social media channels such as social sharing networks, video
channels, photo sharing sites, online communities, and more.
Among the different social media channels, some of the most
popular ones are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, Instagram, Flickr,
Pinterest, and Quora. However, they are all similar yet different from each
other. Let’s look at them in more detail.
Facebook & Twitter
Facebook and Twitter are the prime social network channels.
Facebook, with more than a billion users, is used by most, if not all, of your
customers. Twitter is another tool that is equally effective when it comes to
reaching out to your customers. That being said, let’s look at how you can
optimize these channels:
· Share
interesting but brief content such as compelling messages or shareable
pictures.
· Consider
posting contests and giveaways.
· Use
hashtags generously but always be relevant to the context.
· Cover
industry events, well-edited images, interesting quotes, and whatever you think
works with your audience.
Youtube & Vimeo
Youtube and Vimeo are video channels where you can store your
videos online and allow people to embed them on their websites and blogs. Let’s
look at how you can optimize your business using these channels:
· Always
allow embedding of your videos as you want as many people to share them as
possible.
· Create
short videos and unlike a 10 minute long-drawn story, show snippets of scenes
stitched together in a 1 to 2 minute video.
· Make
videos about customers and their problems, not about your company.
Instagram & Flickr
Instagram and Flickr are the most prominent photo sharing sites on
the internet. Let’s look at how you can use these channels to market your
content:
· Drive
back traffic to your website by linking relevant call to action button in your
images and photos.
· Try
sharing not only official content but photos that bring out your brand’s
personality. A kind of ‘behind the scenes’ image of your company.
· Build a
strong community by asking your followers to post photos for a contest.
Pinterest & Quora
Pinterest and Quora are basically online communities and among the
largest today. Let’s look at how you can utilize these channels:
· With
Pinterest, don’t just post images and pictures. You can even pin videos and
landing pages, so that customers are encouraged to interact with your website’s
actual content.
· As for
Quroa, it’s all about asking the right questions and answering them correctly.
You should also follow topics and people who can influence your customers to
buy your product or service.
Benefits of Using Social Media
Channels
The explosion of social media in the last decade has changed the
way we interact with each other online. This has also changed the way
businesses communicate with their customers. As a result, social media
marketing helps your business in many ways such as:
· Build
you brand reputation and recognition among potential buyers.
· Drive
traffic to your websites, which can lead to sales.
· Gives
small-to-medium size businesses a level playing field, where they can still get
customers even if they do not rank in search engines.
· Allows
you to directly interact with customers and understand their problems better.
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