Learn more about KPIs for your content marketing strategy in our guide to content marketing ROI. Know Your Audience. As mentioned earlier, for a successful content marketing strategy, you’ll need to be clear about who your audience is so you can create the right content to reach them. There are three actions you need to take. Content Marketing — Mastering the Basics. 6 content marketing strategies that make a difference. Content marketing and owned media are going through a renaissance these days, and not just. The content strategy of a brand is the strategic planning of content management and distribution, as part of the overall branding strategy. Content marketing, on the other hand, is the exact way that content will be tailored for the goal to attract and appeal to the target audience. Content marketing is the creation and sharing of content for the purpose of promoting a product or service. Though the focus of this content may not specifically be about your organization or its offerings, often assets created for the purpose of content marketing include a mix of problem-specific information and thought leadership. Welcome to the Beginner's Guide to Content Marketing. You've heard the buzz. 'Content is king,' they say. 'Content is everything,' even. In all of the attempts to get you to read about content marketing, publishers everywhere have injected so much hyperbole and hearsay that it's hard to discern the real advice from the cruddy clickbait that isn't worth your time.
Content Marketing Basics Tutorial
Reading Time: 6minutesMost of us encounter content marketing all the time, every day—even if you don’t know it when you see it. In fact, this article you’re now reading is content marketing. That’s right, content marketing about content marketing. So meta!
Anyway, people talk about content marketing as a form of brand awareness that’s become unavoidable in the digital space and that’s at least partially true. But how does it work, and what do you need to know about it to do it right?
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a system of creating relevant, consistent content so that a brand can reach a desired audience, distribute value, and build trust. The driving force behind any piece of content marketing is relevance and its ability to connect a user to a brand—and hopefully, include them as a possible lead they can email and market to later. But can the brand craft a message that reaches a broad audience and adds value without coming off like a sales pitch? It’s right there in the name—content marketing is a marketing effort, not a sales effort. It’s a thin line, but one that’s important to respect.
Before creating any content, a brand needs to determine what their end game is. Every potential audience member sits at a different place in the brand’s sales funnel, which is sales-speak for the journey that a prospective buyer takes before purchasing a given product or service. To optimize your content strategy, create stuff for the person that’s getting ready to buy tomorrow, as well as the person who hasn’t even heard of you yet. But more on this later.
No matter who you create content for, it’s absolutely vital to provide value with your content, which builds brand trust and keeps you top of mind with potential customers. But being relevant and useful isn’t enough. It must also not suck, because it’s also a reflection of your brand.
So now that we understand the basics of content marketing and why it exists, what types of content marketing exist?
Examples of Content Marketing
Well, we’re glad you asked. Here are six types of content marketing commonly created today.
Books (Digital and Physical)
Books—we’ve all read them. Sometimes on the Internet, sometimes the old-fashioned way. Just like your favorite authors, marketing teams also publish e-books, how-to guides, white papers, and annual reports. Books are quite easy to create, because it is easy to self-publish your content and make a digital copy available for mass consumption.
Videos
Videos are useful because they can be distributed cheaply and easily, across many different channels. According to studies conducted by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, videos are the third-most popular example of content marketing in the B2B space. Videos can be expensive to produce, however, if you contract a third-party agency or invest in top-of-the-line equipment. More recently though, as smartphone videos have increased in quality and capability, they’ve brought down the cost of producing video.
Blogs and Content ‘Hubs’
Blogs are the easiest entry point for most brands, as nearly every brand has one. But not every brand has a good one. It’s a good strategy to focus on a specific topic and create content that pertains directly to that topic and provides real service. For example, if your brand solves a pain related to email marketing, then a content hub focused on email trends, copywriting, and best practices for email marketers would be most effective. These topics are hyper-relevant to your potential customers.
Podcasts
Podcasts disseminate the same valuable information that guides or articles do—only through your headphones instead of your screen. Use this opportunity to deliver content in a conversational format with guests, especially those that can provide insight from firsthand experience. After recording, transcribe the audio content and create a blog post around the conversation for twice the impact.
Infographics
Infographics contain statistics, charts, graphs, and other data that you’ve scraped as a thought leader in your space. The aim of an infographic is to convey information in an insightful and thought-provoking way—not just writing about the stats in a longform report.
Infographics are useful because they generally contain evergreen content—information that always remains relevant. If you plan to create an infographic and you don’t have a ton of design experience, it is best to have the piece professionally designed.
Experiential Content
As more brands master the above mediums, many are moving over to experiential content marketing to provide their users with more memorable brand experiences. Experiential content marketing brings together compelling visuals, explorability, and points of interaction to connect the viewer with the brand on the most intimate level.
Brands that utilize experiential content are often in a better position to connect with viewers over other forms of content purely because it can be so immersive and, as a result, much more memorable.
Oh, hey, what do you know? This is kind of (read: exactly) what we do here at Ceros. Hit us up if this sounds like the type of stuff you want to create.
Why is Content Marketing So Important?
Because audiences have learned to tune out traditional advertising. Have you ever sat through an entire pre-roll video on YouTube? Me neither.
Effective content answers questions and provides guidance while generating brand awareness in a way that doesn’t turn a potential customer off with sales-heavy messaging. As a result, more businesses are investing in creating more engaging, informative, entertaining, and useful content.
But above all, be sure to study your audience and understand what they need before you start your content creation process. The only thing worse than creating no content is pouring effort into making worthless or irrelevant content. Create an ideal customer profile so you can design your content to appeal to that kind of person. By the way, you’re still reading, so I guess this must be relevant to you.
How Does Content Marketing Drive Sales?
Of course, the most important aim of any business is to make a profit. A sound content marketing strategy can be a magnet that pulls people to your business as they begin their journey towards making a purchase. It leads people towards your brand, encourages the audience to consume more of this content regularly, and eventually guides towards a purchase.
As promised, let’s bring it back to the funnel. To drive awareness that leads to sales, you must create the right content for each stage of the customers’ buying journey.
Content Marketing Basics Principles
Awareness Stage
This is the stage where people are asking questions—usually through Google or while perusing social media. Create content that guides them to your online property and answers their questions or delivers the advice they seek at this stage.
People use search engines billions of times a day to search for answers to problems. If your content is informative, engaging, and tackles your audience’s problem head-on, your audience is much more likely to find your content (and might be more likely to stick around on your site).
Consideration Stage
Once a user becomes aware of your brand, the next stage of their journey is about finding the right solution to their problem. Content marketing strategy can also vary from industry to industry, but generally speaking, the content here serves to drive a viewer down the sales funnel with more detailed, valuable information.
Content Marketing Basics Online
In a B2B situation, this stage may consist of white papers and case studies that are more explicit in positioning your product or service against your competitors. In this case, viewers might have reached a stage in the funnel where they are ready to buy, but need to know which product is best for their individual needs.
Decision Stage
Content marketing activities culminate with this final stage—a user should decide that your brand is trustworthy and can provide the right solution for their needs. In the decision stage, guide your audience over to the finish line.
It’s important to be firm about driving people to take action with subtle nudges, but try not to be overly aggressive in this stage. That behavior can very easily lead to them losing interest.
Content Marketing Works
While measuring the ROI of content marketing can be a challenge, it is an important marketing channel for most businesses in today’s world of consistent media consumption. Providing the right content in the right format to the right person at the right time can be extremely powerful for any business—yet even some of the largest companies today still struggle with building a cohesive content marketing strategy.
Whether you’re a designer or a marketer, your content marketing strategy should always start by answering the key questions that a prospective buyer might have about you or your industry. By tailoring the delivery of these answers in entertaining and versatile formats, attracting and keeping new customers will become an effective new channel for business success.
Did you know that 30% of marketers think that their content marketing approach isn’t effective?
That is a relatively large amount of marketers. If you are part of this 30% then we are here to help.
Don’t continue to struggle with your content marketing basics.
Read on to learn the five content marketing basics every business owner should know.
1. Create a Blog
If you are just starting out on the content marketing scene, your website has to have a blog.
In fact, companies who have active blogs get 55% more visits to their website.
Starting a company blog is super easy – and it will cost your company nearly nothing if you create your own content.
Blogs also make your company look like an expert in your industry.
So if your website is lacking custom blog posts, act now.
2. Content is Shareable
Whether we like it or not, social media has taken over our society.
Scroll through Twitter or Facebook and notice how many things are constantly being shared between friends.
Think if you created a blog post or infographic, and that content was shared across social media platforms.
That’s a huge benefit of custom content, and that’s why it is one of the content marketing basics.
Your blog posts could be shared across all social media platforms, potentially exposing your brand to thousands of sets of eyes.
3. Make Sure Your Content is Engaging
You can write until the cows come home, but unless your content engages your customers, you’re wasting your time.
Customers want to know that you’re a trusted source for all of their questions regarding your products and services.
Make sure that your content is adding usefulness to your readers. Share your experiences, knowledge, and helpful hints that relate to your industry.
Chances are, once your customers feel comfortable with the knowledge you share, they will be comfortable with your brand.
4. There are Zero Content Marketing Rules
Aside from making sure that your content is proofread and totally original, there are no rules with content marketing.
Are you becoming stale with new ideas and blog posts? Take something you’ve already created and reformat it.
A great way to take old information and repurpose it is by creating infographics with the information.
Think of the ways you can switch up the content and use it in different spaces within your brand. Take a blog post and incorporate it into emails or white papers.
Get creative with your content!
5. Add Multimedia
We are becoming a society that learns from visuals.
So why not incorporate visuals into your content marketing plan?
Create insightful and engaging videos that will be helpful to your customers.
If you’re selling products on an e-commerce website, make sure that your photos high quality.
Apply the Content Marketing Basics to Your Company
Content marketing can seem overwhelming at first.
But once you get creative with your content, you will see that it is worth all the work.
The stats don’t lie – content marketing is key to running a successful business.
What are some other marketing basics that you would add to this list? Let us know in the comments!
