As forward-thinking marketers lean towards digital content marketing, traditional marketing is rapidly sinking into the background.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online. It uses valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a specific audience to helm then solve their issues.
Finding Success With Content Marketing
Content marketing takes a lot of work, persistence, and patience for it to be successful and to deliver admirable results. But companies still choose to put in the effort for content marketing because of these reasons:
- They want to be found by the right people or potential customers
- They need to build an interested and engaged audience who will be loyal to their brand.
- They want to acquire new customers
- They want to build increased revenue with loyal customers.
- They want to reallocate or reduce marketing costs
Position Your Brand
Provide a consistent and meaningful experience for your audience to build the right image of your brand. Utilize all your content marketing channels and clearly define your brand and product positioning with this guide:
- Determine your existing and potential customers
- Know what your customers are looking for
- Learn the competitive landscape
- Know how your top competitors market their brands
- Establish your brands unique value
- Specify the problems that your product helps to solve
- Identify what makes your product a better choice over your competitors
- Know how you can highlight your brand’s personality
Define Your Owned Media Value Proposition
Pay enough attention to other content where you can learn content strategies to help you develop your owned media. Your editorial niche should uniquely deliver the value of your product to your audience, will let you stand out from other content creators, and will let readers choose to follow your content channels.
There are a lot of visuals that you can include in your media content that can enhance engagement from your audience like:
- Infographics that can turn a bland blog to awesome
- Charts, graphs, and relevant images used throughout the article
- Slideshare which is underutilized but is evidently a pre-eminent visual-sharing platform
Create Well-written Content
Content that is engaging is readable, shareable, hilarious, and simply well-written. Articles that go viral have these attributes that you can integrate into your content:
- Longer length – 3,000 to 10,000 words
- Included images
- Appeals to emotions
- Is a how-to article, a list, or infographic
- Perceived as trustworthy
- Shared by at least one influencer
- Promoted several days, weeks, and months after it was originally written
Determine Your Audience
Know where people in your niche spend their time online, how they connect online or where your audience is interacting online. The key to success in content marketing is finding your audience and drawing them in with your content pieces that aligns to their lifestyle, and answers their concerns, problems, and needs.
Set Goals and Plan Content Production
Set your continent marketing goals that are sustainable for the long-term and can actually connect to your organization’s overarching goals, mission, and vision. Keep your strategy focused and crystal-clear.
Determine the purpose of each content that you want to create and use for marketing your product. Your content should be able to target every part of the customer journey to encourage your customers’ loyalty to your brand. The stages of the customer journey that your content should cover are:
- Awareness stage when your audience become aware of the problem or need and when they get educated about your brand
- Consideration stage when your prospective customers will want to know more on how your product can help solve their problem or other similar problems in the past
- Decision stage when your content will help potential customers determine that your product is the best choice to solve their problem
- Retention stage when your content should keep your client engaged with your brand
- Advocacy stage when your content can spotlight your values, efforts to give back, and outstanding team members to make your customers share your brand with others.
Continually Changing Content Marketing Strategies
The methods used to deliver content to your prospects are continually developing and changing. As you propel your SEO and content marketing strategies, the key to maintaining the lead in this endeavor is to always have trustworthy data in tracking your content. Remember that the ultimate goal is to be good at business because of content.
