According to the latest research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs, “63% of organizations don’t have a documented content marketing techniques”.
Content marketing has been around as early as 1732 if not earlier, when Benjamin Franklin first published his annual Poor Richard’s Almanack to promote his printing business, and now in 2018, while the concept of content marketing has changed little, the ways in which brands can now execute their stories are seemingly limitless.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers surveyed use content marketing in some form or other. And it’s no surprise. If done well, an effective content marketing strategy can grow brand awareness, bring in new customers, drive revenue, and most importantly, help guarantee brand loyalty, conversions, and growth.
Why You Need Content Marketing
According to the research:
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- Companies who publish more than 16 blog posts a month get as much as 3.5x as much traffic as those that publish 0-4 posts a month.
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing
- 61% of US online consumers made a purchase after reading recommendations from a blog
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- Content marketing methods convert 6X more often than other marketing methods.
Here’s how you can get started with a winning content marketing strategy today.
Getting Started with Content Marketing
Set Goals
Knowing what your goals will guide you and your team in other important decisions as you further refine your content marketing strategy. For instance, a common goal is to get people to come to your website or blog and turn them into email subscribers. With their emails, you can build relationships with these people who are clearly interested in your content and hopefully, your product as well.
For others, content marketing is about awareness of an issue that stands for something beyond a brand’s product. The aim is when a customer is aware of a brand’s mission, finds it sufficient to engage your customer to buy the products.
Know your audience and talk to them in a way they’ll understand
A successful content marketing strategy always has two things in mind: your brand’s voice and the audience. If you’re trying to reach younger shoppers, you might want to reach them via social media with a punchy language. But if you’re targeting older shoppers, your content may rely on building authority in the industry, instead.
Tools like Google Analytics can help you measure which content is most popular among your audience and figure out who’s reading what, where, and when.
Measure Demand
Try to understand the type of content your audience wants and what questions they’re having about your product or business.
You can always listen to your audience and talk with your community, but somewhere you should start guiding your process as well.
Promote your content! And do so consistently
Okay, so now you’ve got all this great content in the pipeline. You’re posting to your blog three times a week, have plans to develop a bimonthly newsletter and a video series. How do you make sure people actually see your content? You can create great content but, like the proverbial tree that falls in the forest, if no one reads it, does it matter?
An email newsletter is one of the most important modes of content distribution. It’s imperative for marketers to start building email lists as soon as possible, and have a plan about how you’re going to use it.
Another significant strategy is to ensure people can find your content through organic search. This involves doing keyword research and taking advantage of SEO to make sure your content promotes itself but is truly still valuable rather than just stuffed with keywords that improve ranking. The content that best does this is the evergreen content that anchors the other content in your blog and represents the core of your brand’s values and content strategy.
Last, set up an editorial calendar. When you first start out, make sure the content you’re committed to producing is something you and your team can handle and keep up. Whether it’s one post a week or two posts per month or simply one robust email newsletter each quarter, make sure you execute consistently on schedule.
Measure Results
Finally, it’s time to assess the success of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you’ll return to those KPIs you set at the start of the content strategy plan, and see what’s changed and whether you’re hitting your targets.
To do this, you can:
- Check Google Analytics as depicted above to analyze how your content is performing
- Measure social sharing activity via social analytics tools
- Take a look at OptinMonster’s conversion analytics dashboard to evaluate the accomplishment of your marketing efforts
Other tools for tracking content marketing success include Mention and Google Alerts. Both of these will let you see if your content is being mentioned and shared, helping you hit those KPIs for awareness and engagement.
Ready, Set, Write!
Creating a long-term, engaging and rewarding content strategy is no easy feat but if done well with long and short term goals in mind, it’s certain to pay off. If it seems overwhelming, don’t forget that you’re not just adding to the noise and pushing another product – you’re a storyteller sharing your brand’s story that deserves to be heard. Try different tips and tricks to attract your customers.
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