Marketing content to provide value, create awareness, sell products, promote service, or inform people is Content Marketing. This content can be a well-researched piece of article, blog post, whitepaper, case study, guide, press release, infographic, banner, GIF, meme, or a video.

Today, the audience craves inspiration, motivation, and problem-solving. Producing content that meets the audience’s expectations is the only way to sustain and succeed.

Sounds good? But still, needs clarity?

What is Content Marketing?

It is a strategic marketing technique that focuses on producing and delivering quality, meaningful, and consistent content to gain and retain the targeted audience & stimulate profitable consumer actions.

This implies a long-term approach to cultivating a strong connection with the target audience by consistently delivering effective content pertinent to them. Clients’ allegiance will eventually lay with you when they make a buying decision. They will buy your goods and prefer them over the alternatives. Unlike one-time promotion, content marketing demonstrates that you genuinely care about your clients.

Types of Content

HubSpot put together a list of different content types used in the content promotion strategy.

All these content formats can be used to market the products/services. However, it is not necessary to use all of them. I’d advise you to do the market analysis, understand your audience, and create a content marketing strategy.

After analyzing the market and putting together a strategy, understand what your audience wants to see, how they interact, what content type brings the most traction/conversion. Once you have the clarity, you can improve the strategy further to enhance user engagement, conversion, and retention.

Why Content Marketing is Important?

High-quality content marketing is super important as it connects you with your audience. It speaks to the concerns of your audience. You can create customer trust, increase conversion rates, engage with consumers, and generate sales leads via effective content marketing. According to the State of Inbound survey, content development is a high focus for 53% of marketers. Furthermore, it contributes around 29% of B2B marketing expenses.
Here are a few reasons why content marketing is super effective and essential for companies running their online business.

Content Marketing Educates The Audience

Content marketing helps educate potential customers about the benefits of your product, your strengths over your competition, and your unique selling point. It builds brand awareness in a way no other marketing channel can. It gives you the freedom to explain what your product is, who it is for, how it is better than the competitors in the market, how it will help them, and the long-term benefits.

Content Marketing Leads to Connection

Producing high-quality content will also aid in the development of your website authority. You are more prone to appear at the top of the search engines if your company has established itself as a reliable source of information. Once your message is out there, it attracts the right customers to you and develops a solid connection with them. They look at you for the answers. Furthermore, if your consumers see you as an expert in the field, they will trust you. Your content must showcase your knowledge of the subject matter and provide valuable solutions to your audience’s problems.

Content Marketing Builds Trust

Quality content is a great asset. It can give your prospective consumers good experiences and entice them to return for more. It is your key to attracting the audience’s interest and maintaining a strong brand image over time. Your audience is more inclined to trust your advice and suggestions if you provide value without expectation of return. Finally, once your content appears in the right place at the right time with the right audience, your company’s credibility will increase.

Content Marketing Drives Sales

Conversions are influenced by the content you publish. It allows your audience to interact with you while also providing them with the knowledge to make informed purchases. As a result, it improves lead generation. Your audience is more inclined to buy from you in the future if they see and like your content. Furthermore, your content must always have a call to action that directs your audience to the next step. CTAs embedded in your content can help your sales staff create new leads.

Content Marketing is Cheap and Long-Term

It is way cheaper than traditional marketing. Not just that, it is also more cost-effective than paid and affiliate marketing.
You can pay $150-$2000 for a great piece of writing to a freelancer or hire a full-time content writer in your team and streamline the content generation process.
Besides being cost-effective, it is also long-term. Content stays forever on the website and works as your 24*7 sales agent. It also supports other marketing channels such as SEO by helping you rank on search engines for targeted keywords, social media marketing by spreading your message to the right audience, and paid marketing by giving a concise and clear shout-out to your potential customers.

How to Do Content Marketing?

Now, you know the benefits of effective content marketing. Let’s talk about how to create a great content marketing strategy to reach the masses.

Here are a few steps that I follow while creating a bomb content marketing plan,

1. Define objectives – what is the purpose of creating the content. Do I need more sales, do I want to educate my audience, is my goal to bring more traffic. Once I have my objective defined, I move forward to the next step.
2. Understand my audience – which my targeted audience is. Once I have the clarity of who will read my blog/article or any piece of content and what actions I want my audience to take, I jump over to the next step.
3. Analyze your competitors – Next step I do is analyze the competition. Who is on the top, their strategies, what kind of content they are producing, what keywords they are ranking for, and their USP? Once I have the competitive data, I use that data in my strategy to replace them on the top.
4. Finalize keywords and topics – Now I know my objective, audience, and competition; my next step is to finalize the right keywords, pain points, and issues to enter the market and potentially rule it. I use Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, and AnswerThePublic to research keywords, pain points, and titles.
5. Create a content marketing plan – Now, I use all the information to draft a high-quality and effective content marketing plan. To be more precise and clear, I further break down my plan in marketing funnels and define personas, word count, asset type, content type, messaging type, and brand tone-related details. So, once I send this plan to my writers for content development, they will have complete clarity on what to write, how to write, and how to position the brand to maximize gains.
6. Review content – The next step is to review the content produced by the writing team and suggest any changes required before making it live.
7. Schedule/Publish content – Once the suggested changes are made and the content is up to the mark, I assign dates for content publishers to ensure that the right content is going live at the right time on the right platform.
8. Plan content distribution – The next step is to plan the content distribution over various marketing channels such as social media, paid campaigns, email marketing, etc.
9. Monitor content performance – Once the content is created, published, and shared, the next step is to monitor its performance in terms of ranking, traffic, brand awareness, lead generation, conversion, and revenue.
10. Update existing content – The last step in the content marketing cycle is to update existing content to accelerate its reach and amplify the gains. I analyze the content performance and report it to the team and upper management. Once I have clear visibility of how every asset performed, I create a plan to update the content where required based on START, STOP, & CONTINUE strategy.

This is my little insight on content marketing, its benefits, and how I work on content marketing strategy. If you are looking to hire content marketing services or are in doubt about why content marketing fails, reach out to me, and I will be more than glad to streamline your processes for you.