What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a strategy and business process that uses valuable and relevant digital assets like text, images, and video to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. It’s a type of inbound marketing strategy that delivers value to a business’s audience through entertaining, educational, or informative content.
Content marketing comes in four basic forms — written, audio, video, and image. Most businesses use several forms of content to engage with their audiences across platforms like social media, websites, and ads.
This form of marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming customers with advertising-laden messaging, content marketing provides them with valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey.
Why is content marketing important?
The world is transitioning to a point where customers are tired of being fed advertisements. Consumers are inundated with information to the point where it all becomes noise. Content marketing helps businesses overcome the noise by subtly promoting their offerings through helpful, high-quality content.
Content marketing puts the customer at the heart of a brand’s messaging. Rather than spamming customers with advertising-laden messaging, it provides them with valuable content and engages them throughout the customer journey.
How content marketing works?
Once you’ve decided on the types of content marketing your business will create, it’s time to build a content marketing strategy. The purpose of content marketing is to deepen relationships and solve problems, so every content marketing strategy should address the three stages of content marketing.
1. Awareness
The awareness stage is the first step of every customer journey. This is when customers become aware of an issue or a problem they have. At this stage, content marketing should focus on customer needs and pain points without overly promoting your solutions or products. The best types of content for the awareness stage include blogs answering common questions with an FAQ, informative how-to videos, or high-level eBooks.
2. Consideration
In the consideration stage, your audience knows they have a problem and begins looking for solutions to their problem. Businesses should still deliver value with their content marketing at this stage, but they can now add a few well-placed promotions within the content. The best types of content for this stage include helpful infographics and how-to blogs.
3. Decision
In the decision stage, your audience decides whether they’re going to choose your solution or not. This is the stage when your content marketing should lean more heavily into sales-related content. Content like comparison lists, customer testimonials, product demo videos, and buyer guides do well at this stage. Businesses can also use retargeted paid ads to bring lost leads back into the fold.
How to do content marketing
1. Know who your customers are
Companies need to make sure they understand their audience and know how to engage with them. Customer segmentation allows companies to build detailed views of their customers with buyer personas. These personas not only help the company understand its customers but also identify the types of content that will best resonate with different customer segments. By activating and acting on these personas, a company can successfully communicate with its audience, build trust, and find new customers.
2. Figure out what information they’ll need
The next step is to determine what information is necessary to connect customers with your product, brand, or service. Identify your audience’s pain points so you better understand their priorities, challenges, and preferences. From there, your content marketing strategy should answer common questions and solve your audience’s problems. The better your content solves a problem, the more likely your audience is to engage with you.
3. Decide how to deliver that information
Once you know your customer and what they need, you’ll need to deliver content via the best medium for your target audience. For example, if your customer personas reveal that your ideal buyers spend a lot of time on Facebook, it means you should deliver content on that platform. By going where your audience spends their time online, you can ensure they see your content and engage with your brand.
4. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for success
Content marketing is effective, but attribution isn’t always simple. Businesses should establish content marketing KPIs to help them understand how their content is performing. However, the KPIs you choose will depend on your goals. Some businesses track content engagement, like views and comments, while others look for conversions. The key is to set measurable, realistic KPIs for your business.
5. Create good content
This goes without saying, but businesses have to generate professional content that entertains and informs their audience. Follow these tips to create better content:
- Create clear, well-written content that doesn’t use jargon.
- Deliver value to your audience, whether in the form of actionable tips, discounts, or insider information.
- Create different pieces of content for customers at different stages of the funnel.
- Ensure your content works with the channel you’re using. You can reuse the same ideas in a blog for social media, but you might have to adjust it to communicate better with users on a different platform.
6. Set a schedule
Your business needs to release content on a consistent basis to attract both regular traffic and search engine crawlers. Creating a posting schedule can help you release content regularly, but be realistic. It’s easy to be overly ambitious, so start with one blog post or video a week. Remember that overnight success isn’t possible with content marketing, so it will take time for you to gather enough data to see if your posting schedule is effective or not.
7. Set a budget
While content marketing is one of the most affordable forms of marketing, it isn’t free. Businesses should always set a budget for their content marketing initiatives so they can measure return on investment (ROI). Create a budget for hiring freelancers, buying content tools, and running paid ads to control your spending.
8. Analyze and measure results
Make sure you regularly sit down with your marketing team to review how your content marketing efforts stack up against your target KPIs. Analyzing and measuring your performance can help you understand which pieces perform better, which can ultimately help you create stronger content. It also allows marketers to shift their budget toward more successful types of content and away from underperforming projects.