It is no secret that old-style forms of marketing are less effectual than they were once for transforming leads into customers and reaching prospects, and also interrupted audience members. Thus, content marketing is now turning out to be an extremely popular and important way for businesses to influence and engage their targeted audience.
One can increase conversions by providing your audience members with useful content to inform them about your services and products, as well as offer value through articles, videos and other engaging, useful material. This helps them to obtain knowledge regarding your company, effectively helps solve their challenges & pain points and even build lasting relationships. Content marketing helps in improving brand awareness, boosting revenue and much more.
Table of Contents
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing can be defined as a process of planning, constructing, distributing, and publishing content in order to reach targeted audience with content that is helpful and help solidify trust. In businesses, this tactic helps in connecting with your target audience, improving brand awareness, engage customers and prospects, and ultimately boost sales. The key, as mentioned above, is to add value for your audience so they keep coming back for more.
The Importance of Content Marketing
In today’s competitive world of business, outbound marketing strategies aren’t considered as effective as they used to be to reach your audience members and further convert leads into potential customers. But today, it is possible with the help of content marketing to combat this issue. As per Research Dive analyst review, content marketing is now greatly accepted by businesses for customer engagement, promoting products, and for personalized marketing. In addition, companies are finding that content marketing helps boost their business by:
- Educating your prospects and leads about the services & products you offer.
- Boosting conversions.
- Building relationships between your business and customers.
- Connecting with your audience members to show how you can benefit them by resolving their challenges.
- Creating a sense of community about your brand.
Ways to Create Content Marketing Strategy
The global content marketing industry is anticipated to reach up to $107,540.6 million by the end of forecast period. The most significant part of growing your whole inbound marketing strategy is to publish a useful content in your blog and grow its reach through SEO, email subscriptions, and social media. Your primary focus should be on bringing more and more visitors to your website, which will increase the opportunities to convert leads into customers. Listed below are some of the ways to create a content marketing strategy for your business:
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Set SMART Goals
Setting SMART goals should be the first part of your content marketing strategy. These are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely.
This strategy will help your business in broader marketing and ultimately reaching company goals. SMART goals will help to increase conversions, improve brand awareness, increase customer engagement, boost revenue, build customer trust and improve brand quality.
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Choose the Type of Content
Next, decide the type of content you want to create. You can start by thinking about your buyer personas and target audience. Answering the following questions listed below about your target audience will help your business in narrowing down the right type of content for them:
- What do they need from you?
- What challenges are they looking to overcome?
- Why do they need from your product or service?
- How can you help them succeed?
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Choose the Right Content Channels
Once you’re sure on which type of content to use for content marketing, now it’s time to choose the right and specific content channels. However, there are certain content types for which choosing the right content channel is fixed. For instance, your content channel will be blog content if you are creating a blog. You may, however, distribute that content on other channels such as social media.
If you choose social media, there is a need to decide the right platform for marketing on such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. That will largely depend on what channels your audience is active on. For other content, you need to consider channels because of fit. If you pick an infographic, video or other type of visual content, you’ll need to consider how it will appear and where, as well as the channels you’ll use to promote the content.
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Set a Budget
After choosing the channel, you should set your budget for content marketing. Consider the type of content you ought to create and which channel you’ve selected for marketing that content on. Later, ask the following questions to determine your budget:
- Is there any need to purchase any technology or software to create the content such as Canva, Adobe Photoshop, etc.?
- Is there any need to hire any content team members such as designers, writers, editors and artists?
- Is there any need to pay for ad space?
- Is there any requirement or access to resources or specific tools to measure or enhance your specific type of content?
Answering these above mentioned questions will help you in determining how your responses have impacted your estimated budget.
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Create and Share the Content
Create and share your content so that your target audience members can be possibly converted into potential customers. To ensure you’re consistently creating content and distributing it among your prospects and customers, use an editorial content calendar or social media calendar. This may help your team to stay on top of all of the content being created and even schedule it ahead of time.
Make use of a free editorial calendar to optimize and schedule all of your marketing content, which will help in boosting conversions.
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Analyze & Measure Results
Lastly, analyze & measure your results as this will allow you to make any necessary changes to improve your content marketing efforts and ultimately reach more and more audience members. Look at your SMART goals to determine the success of your content marketing strategy.
Listed below are a few tools to help you with your content marketing strategy analytics and results:
- HubSpot social media software
- HubSpot marketing analytics software
- Mention social media marketing software
- Sprout Social social media analytics software
- SharedCount engagement tool
- Google Analytics
Conclusion
Conversions and target audience members can be reached with effective content marketing. There are numerous ways to market your content, boost your company revenue, and build relationships with customers. Hence, develop a content marketing strategy that is suitable for your audience and business and begin to enhance your bottom line today.
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