The ultimate guide to content marketing
Photo by Ron Lach
Welcome to the new golden age of digital marketing
If you're looking to create a successful marketing strategy for your business, there are a few key things to keep in mind. For the last 10+ years, content marketing has been the best, most cost-effective, and most long-term growth marketing strategy for businesses. As online advertising becomes more and more competitive, effective content marketing will be more important than ever. In 2022 and heading into 2023, content strategy and content creation remain essential to growing your top- and bottom-line results.
What is content marketing?
It’s essential to understand what content marketing is before we can develop an effective content strategy. Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Content is king. Long-live content.
The term “content is king” is often used in conjunction with content marketing. It implies that unique, high-quality, interesting, and relevant content contributes more to a company's success than anything else.
Content marketing is all about creating content that your audience will find valuable. Integrated media strategies involve anything from articles, user generated content, professional white papers, infographics, or videos. The key is to produce content they will find helpful to your online community.
How to balance content creation with content promotion?
A key component of your content marketing lifecycle is content distribution. You need to get your content in front of the right people to see results. Content distribution involves publishing on websites, social media platforms, press releases, and popular publications. When done well, content can help attract more customers, drive more traffic to your website, and generate more leads.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing is one of the most important aspects of online marketing. It is creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers. It helps organizations establish themselves in thought leadership and build lasting relationships with online communities.
How can I use content marketing for my business?
Content strategy stems from brand strategy, which provides a central, unifying concept for your business. The best brands speak with one distinctive voice — internally and externally. In addition to web design, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and public relations (PR), corporate communications can be vital in managing employee relations.
Content marketing is a powerful growth strategy that can help you achieve your business development goals. Employees are now referred to as "internal customers" because it's critical to advertise your mission and tell your story to those who will interact with your customers. When done correctly, content marketing inspires employees to take action in ways that align with your customer acquisition goals and objectives.
What's involved in creating a content marketing strategy?
Creating a content marketing strategy can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be. Here are a few tips to help you get started:
How to plan for a digital marketing content strategy?
1. Figure out your goals.
If you're just starting, don't set a goal to run a marathon in six months. Start small and gradually build up to more challenging goals. One way to define your goals is to ask what you want to achieve in the short-term, medium-term, and long-term. Write these down and keep them somewhere you can see them.
What do you want to achieve with your content marketing?
Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads?
Are you working with influencers or affiliate marketing that requires online collaboration?
Good project management relies on effective strategy and goal-setting from the beginning. Objectives, goals, milestones, and KPIs should be specific, measurable, achievable, time-bound, and focused on adding value for your audience.
For example, a "go viral" goal isn't very specific or easy to measure. On the other hand, a plan to "publish quality content every day" is specific, measurable, achievable, and realistic.
Image by Ketut Subiyanto
2. Know your audience.
Knowing your audience is critical to effective content marketing. Without knowing your audience, creating relevant and engaging content is impossible. Tailoring content based on your audience’s needs and interests makes it more likely to read your content.
Remember, content marketing goes far beyond the point of sale. It's not a yell-sell or strictly promotional tactic. Effective content marketing considers all our audiences and provides a communication strategy. When evaluating each of our audiences, we can categorize them based on who we're speaking to:
New and existing customers
Employees
Investors
Press and media members
Partners, suppliers, vendors, etc.
Infographic: Content marketing is central in communicating with each of your audiences — internally and externally
Before you begin writing content and sharing it with your audiences, be sure to answer the following questions:
Who is it for?
What do they want or need?
How will they find it?
3. Choose the best channels.
Not all channels are proper for every audience. The best way to start is by identifying which channels your audience is already using to engage with them where they are.
Remember, the distribution channel and the content are not the same things. Think about the channel as being the pipe, and the content is the water inside. It's important to consider what channels are most effective, but if you don't have any valuable content to fill it with, then the delivery method won't do you any good.
Infographic: Content distribution and promotion happens across all channels
What are effective content marketing channels?
Websites
Social media platforms
Ecommerce
PR
Influencer networks
Affiliate marketing
Pay per click advertising
Native advertising
4. Create a content calendar.
A content calendar, also known as an editorial calendar, is part of a strategic planning and content creation process. It provides a framework for all your content marketing activities. The editorial calendar provides a written strategy detailing your content marketing deliverables' who, what, when, and where.
Why does a business need a framework for creating content?
Simply put, most people are only interested in high-quality content. We are busy with our daily lives, jobs, families, and hobbies. No one will take extra time out of their day to read content that doesn't provide value. When we refer to "high-quality" content, we don't mean "expensive" or "luxury." When we refer to high-quality content, we simply refer to the content your audience needs.
Generating ideas for fresh and exciting content can be just as challenging as creating high-quality content. As a result, most businesses struggle to produce engaging and informative content.
A content calendar with coordinated project management for your team can ensure that you're consistently strategizing, planning, and producing valuable content. A content calendar includes all your most important content and communications activities attached to goals and dates. Publishing content regularly is essential for your audience to learn what to expect from you.
What should you include in your content calendar?
Product launches
Announcements
Paid media campaigns
Press releases
Social media posts
Thought leadership
Videos
Articles
Design elements (vector graphics, infographics, web landing pages, etc.)
User generated content (UGC)
Influencer campaigns
Podcasts
What are some of the keys to content marketing?
1. Start with a strong headline.
Your headline is the first thing your readers will see, so it's essential to ensure it grabs their attention. Do your research to understand what your audience is looking for and what the competition offers. Try to be creative and make your headline stand out from all the other content your audience sees online.
2. Write for your audience.
When you're writing your content, always keep your audience in mind. Think about what your audience would want to read and what topics they are interested in. Be sure to think beyond the point of sale and try adding something valuable to their lives.
3. Use visuals.
A picture is worth a thousand words, which is undoubtedly true regarding content marketing. Adding visuals to your posts to help break up the text and make them more engaging.
How do I use keywords and hashtags strategically?
Keywords and hashtags are vital to web optimization and social media marketing. Google's search engine algorithm is different from social media platforms. Even social media platforms are other in how they rank and show additional content to different users.
Keyword research
Make sure you research to include the optimal keywords and relevant hashtags based on your audience. Content written well with effective keywords is more likely to help you build backlinks because other websites will want to link to it. The best way to improve your online rankings is to use keywords and hashtags that are both natural and effective.
What are the best tools to use for content marketing?
Don't let it hold you back if you don't have a photographer, videographer, or graphic designer on your team. Plenty of tools are available to help content amateurs look like pros.
Here are some of the best content marketing tools we use with our clients:
Content writing
SEMRush is a valuable online platform for website keyword research, content topic ideas, and real-time content analysis.
Grammarly is the best tool for grammar, spelling, and voice and tone suggestions in all your content writing.
Jasper.ai is the ultimate cure for writer’s block. Jasper.ai is an ai content writing platform that can help generate helpful content for nearly all your copywriting needs.
Photo by Tranmautritam
Design, photography, and videography
For professionals: Adobe Creative Cloud provides the world’s best design software, including InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop. Adobe CC also gives you access to Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere for video editing and one of the world’s largest typography libraries with Adobe Fonts.
For beginners, entrepreneurs, and social media gurus: Adobe Express is excellent for beginners who aren’t preparing to spend thousands of hours learning the ins and outs of the more advanced platforms available through Adobe Creative Cloud. The free plan includes thousands of unique templates, design assets, Adobe Stock royalty-free photos, and more. And it’s available on the web or mobile, so you don’t have to have a MacBook Pro to master content creation.
For UI/UX design and page layouts: Figma is the world’s premier design platform for general UI/UX, product design, web design, page layout, flowcharting, and team collaboration. Born in the cloud, Figma seamlessly connects everyone in the design process so teams can collaborate more efficiently, similar to Google Docs.
Measuring the success of your content marketing strategy
There are many ways to measure the success of your content marketing strategy, but it's essential to pick the right metrics to track. For example, if your goal is customer acquisition, you may want to consider factors including website traffic leads generated, social media shares, and email subscribers.
Once you've selected the metrics you want to track, you need to set up a real-time data and analytics system. Free tools from Google (Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Optimize, Google Search Console, and Google Tag Manager) can help you track almost anything you can imagine online. Google even provides a free business intelligence (BI) reporting tool called Google Data Studio to help you develop custom dashboards for your team.
Final thoughts
Great content marketing can take time to show results. If you do not see results, adjust your strategy. Try experimenting with different content formats, topics, and promotion tactics to see what works best.
Are you ready to take your content strategy to the next level?
Grow your business working with a full-stack digital marketing and content strategy team. Mixline Media offers everything you need to launch your brand and grow your organization.
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