Grow Your Business with Content Marketing

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Why does it matter?

A content marketing strategy is more important today than ever. To be successful, businesses need to create brand awareness, build reputations and nurture prospects through the sales funnel. The Internet has given customers many more options, completely flipping the buying cycle. As a result, your content marketing strategy must focus on creating content that’s helpful to your target audience—whether it’s to educate, entertain or a mix of both.

The keys to a successful content marketing strategy

STEP 1: Determine your target audience

Before you write a single word, develop a picture of the people who will read it. Understand your audience and the buyer’s journey. One way of doing this is to look at your analytics to see what content attracts better traffic, time on site, and conversion. Cross-check the demographic and source to frame your audiences correctly. This will help you create content that connects and creates trust, ultimately leading to conversion.

STEP 2: Know your channel

People consume information through websites, email newsletters, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, paid ads, forums – the list goes on. If you deliver content through only one of them, you’ll miss a large chunk of your potential audience. Make sure you thoroughly understand how each channel works before you start executing ideas. Because each channel and content format has its unique strengths and limitations, put strategies in place for every channel you’ll use to communicate with your audience and then tie them together into a cohesive, omnichannel strategy.

Step 3: Choose your format

When you have worked out where you’ll share your content, start planning the type of content you want to create. You will likely end up using a mix of different formats: videos, blogs, how-to-lists, images and maybe even user-generated content. Planning this will go a long way to ensuring that what you give your audience is valuable and engaging.

STEP 4: Execute

An editorial calendar is a great way to stay on track here. One reason content marketing strategies fail is that no single person has accountability for content marketing, and your content loses focus or, worse, fizzles out altogether. Put someone in charge of the plan and execute consistently, day in and day out.

STEP 5: Monitor results

Monitoring comes at the end of this framework, but for many, it’s the beginning, middle and end of your content marketing strategy. You should constantly aim to discover more about your readers and how they interact with your content. Monitoring shows you how successful the content you produce is or could be. This will help you optimise your strategy by identifying the content items with most engagement and lead generation.

 

Stay for the long haul!

A content strategy must, above all, have a long-term goal. There’s no point posting a few blogs and some social media posts and expecting the leads to roll in; it simply doesn’t work like that. Be consistent in the amount of content and your content style you produce to project a clear and tangible brand voice.