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Are you using content marketing effectively to reach your customers and grow your business?
These days, content is one of the best ways to raise brand awareness among a targeted audience. Content marketing campaigns can also bring you online authority, web traffic, leads, and sales.
There’s just one problem.
Without the right content marketing strategy, tactics, and tools, you won’t get those benefits.
So how do you avoid wasting your time on the wrong content marketing approach?
Simple. Read this guide.
At Marketing Mantra, we talk a lot about Content Marketing as a really effective way to attract, engage, and delight customers online. But we still get a lot of questions from people all around the world about Content Marketing. So, we decided to answer them all.
2. What are the types of Content Marketing?
3. Why content marketing is important?
4. How to Start Content Marketing?
What is Content Marketing?
This is a huge topic, so let's start by defining exactly what we mean when we talk about content marketing.
Content marketing is a marketing strategy that revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic (and therefore new customers) to your business.
Content marketing means marketing your business with content. It sounds deceptively simple, but there’s a lot to it.
First, there’s the content part. That’s stuff like blog posts, articles, podcasts, and videos. Basically, it’s information in written, audible, or visual form.
So, what about the marketing part? That hasn’t changed since marketing first took place in actual markets. It’s all about telling your target audience about your products and services so they want to become customers. With content marketing, you do this with content.
What are the Types of Content Marketing?
There are many types of content marketing that you may choose to incorporate in your strategy — here are some of the most common:
1. Blog Content Marketing
Blog posts are most effective when used strictly for good, like most types of content marketing. Rather than blogging about how your newest product will change lives, you should be writing about topics related to your products or services.
You literally won’t need to push your products when you establish your company as a leading industry expert, whether locally or internationally. Add genuine impact by adding something new and valuable, above and beyond what the many, many generic blogs out there offer.
After all, your readers want to know what you know and how you can help solve their problem, not what everyone else has already said. Definitely forget leaning hard into keywords, the user experience is far more valuable today.
2. Social Media Content Marketing
social media marketing is all about getting people to look AND respond directly. You want engagement that is palpable.
It can take some effort to find both the type of content and medium that really resonates with your social media followers, but if you are already producing other types of content for your marketing, the good news is that you can easily repurpose them for social media, too.
By watching your social media analytics, you will be able to figure out pretty quickly if your audience is the type that prefers videos or blogs, serious posts from your CEO, or funny posts from your staff writers. Plus, you will be able to gauge how much traffic social media is generating to your site.
3. Video Content Marketing
Video content can be expensive to produce, as well as time-consuming, but it is hot and in demand among many consumers. Although many prefer written content, those that want video are still wanting to see even more than they can get their hands on right now.
A well-produced video spot shows a whole different side of your business (much like a podcast does) and can give you a better way to create content that demonstrates how to do something or how something works.
Consider videos for more than just blogging; they are also great for teaching someone how to replumb their own sink trap using your product or show potential customers how you manufacture your golf clubs, from start to finish.
Don’t forget to create captions for your videos and include a text introduction to help humans better navigate their way to what they really want to see. You can then use this content almost anywhere, from your main website to your blog, your social media page, or even in email campaigns.
4. Infographic Content Marketing
Infographics are one that can really throw a big curveball for digital marketers. It is a shame because a good infographic can get a lot of attention in the form of shares and inbound links.
Of course, you can’t use an infographic for everything, nor should you. But choosing the right time and graphic can elevate this content format to the sublime.
Successful infographics are simple, impactful, and meaningful. The point of them is to take a lot of complicated information from a study or survey and break it down into the most important points.
They can be used to punctuate written blogs or as standalone content for both blogging platforms and social media - just remember to keep it simple and impactful filled with strong data points.
5. Podcast Content Marketing
High-quality podcasts have been extremely lucrative for some digital marketers, though they are far from a universal solution for your content needs. Once you have the right equipment, they can be simple to produce and, if distributed through a podcast network, can have massive reach. It is still important to plan a podcast ahead of time, though, and not just try to wing it — that path only leads to tears.
Use your professionally composed podcast to bring more awareness to your brand from difficult to penetrate markets with specialty niches, and also as a way to showcase your brand’s personality in a very big way.
Why Content Marketing is important?
No matter what industry your brand is a part of, content marketing is an effective way to bolster your marketing efforts. Every brand with a successful marketing strategy utilizes content marketing in some shape or form.
Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
Boost conversions
Build relationships between your customers and business that result in increased loyalty
Show your audience how your products and services solve their challenges
Create a sense of community around your brand
How to Start Content Marketing?
If you’re in that group and have been wondering how to create a content strategy for your business, we’re here to help.
We’ve successfully used content marketing to grow our own traffic and boost conversions since Marketing Mantra first launched in 2021, and we want to share with you what we’ve learned along the way.
Let's walk you through some simple steps to developing and executing a content marketing plan that’ll help you grow your business without wasting time and money.
1. Set Your Mission and Your Goals
A good starting point for your content strategy plan is to set out a content marketing mission statement. This is a brief statement that makes it easier to focus on what’s important – and what’s not – in creating your content so your content marketing strategy stays on track.
A content marketing mission statement outlines:
Your target audience
The content you’ll use to reach them
The benefit they’ll get
While the mission statement covers what your audience will get from your content marketing strategy, you also need to think about what your business will get from it. That’s where your business goals come in.
Typical goals include:
Improving revenue as a result of your content marketing strategy
Making more sales and getting more high-quality leads, which will help you meet your revenue goals.
Getting more traffic to your site, as the more traffic there is, the greater the possibilities for meeting your other goals.
Improving the perception of your business, so you gain influence and authority and are seen as a thought leader.
SEO success, which leads to more traffic.
Reduced marketing costs, as your content becomes more effective.
Social media engagement, which can help with both traffic and authority.
Once you know your goals, it’s time to move to the next step.
2. Establish Your KPIs
The best way to achieve goals is to make them specific and measurable. That means setting key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy.
The KPIs will help you know when you have achieved your goals by providing milestones you can check off. They’ll include what you plan to achieve in terms of revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, traffic and different aspects of digital marketing like email marketing and social media metrics.
Typically, these will have specific numbers attached to them. For example, you might want to:
Hit a certain revenue target within the month, quarter, or year.
Get more signups for your lead magnet as a sign that you’re getting more high-quality leads
Get a certain number of new email subscribers
See an increase in site traffic and in engagement with your onsite content
Improve the search ranking of some of your key pages to help boost traffic
Get a certain number of mentions, shares, and comments for your pillar content
Be invited to participate in certain key industry events
You’ll also want to pay attention to marketing expenditure, tracking your spend on different campaigns, and keeping an eye on the cost of acquiring leads and making sales
3. Know Your Audience
As mentioned earlier, for a successful content marketing strategy, you’ll need to be clear about who your audience is so you can create the right content to reach them. There are three actions you need to take.
*Collect Demographic Data
The first step is to collect demographics on your visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.
Web analytics, social media analytics, and email subscriber analytics will give you the data you need on your audience’s:
Age
Gender
Education
Income
*Get Customer Feedback
To learn even more about your target audience, Getting the right customer feedback can help you:
Understand your readers’ and subscribers’ priorities
Decide on the best places to reach your customers.
Flesh out your buyer personas, which we’ll talk about next
*Create Buyer Personas
When you have demographic data and customer feedback, you can create or flesh out buyer personas. Buyer personas, also known as customer avatars, describe your ideal readers and customers so that you can target content better.
4. Assess Your Current Position
Many businesses already have content out there. This will include content that’s on your blog, as well as social media content, podcasts, videos, and so on.
That’s why the next step is to figure out whether that content is helping you to meet your goals.
To do that, you’ll need to carry out a content audit. That means:
Logging all the pieces of content, such as blog posts, guest posts, and so on
Assessing their usefulness or success
Identifying the gaps
You may also want to look at how your content compares with that of your competitors, and see how any new content will fit in the market.
5. Figure Out the Best Content Channels
As you work through this process, you’ll start to get a sense of where your audience is hanging out, and where you already have a successful online presence.
It’s best to focus on what’s working and expand from there, rather than try to do everything at once.
6. Decide on Content Types
There are some content types that every content marketing strategy will include.
Most successful content marketing strategies rely on having a central core of content published on your own site (or home base) which can then be repurposed and shared on other sites (outposts).
So blog posts are an essential part of your content marketing mix, and they still deliver strong results. Ideally, your blog posts will be actionable, valuable, and shareable, and may include a range of article types.
The next step is to figure out what you need to create that content.
7. Identify and Allocate Resources
Now that you know what type of content you’re planning to create, who it’s for, and where you’re planning to share it, it’s important to make sure you have everything you need to deliver on your content marketing strategy. That involves answering questions like:
Who’s in charge of producing and maintaining content?
What human, physical or digital tools and resources do you need to create the content?
What will your publishing workflow look like, including content scheduling?
There’s just one more thing to do before you get started on researching and creating pieces of content: creating a content calendar, so you know what’ll be published when. We’ll look at that in the next step.
8. Create a Content Calendar
As part of your content strategy, you’ll need to know exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the platforms you want to use.
Lack of planning is a key content marketing mistake, so it’s essential to use a content calendar to get all your content scheduled. There are several ways to do this.
9. Create Content
As you’ve seen, there’s a lot of prep work in your content marketing strategy before you actually create a piece of content. But now it’s time to do just that. We’re going to use a blog post as our example, but these tips will work for almost any type of content creation.
With the research you’ve already done, you’ll have an idea of what type of blog post to create.
10. Distribute and Market
The next key part of your content strategy is distribution and marketing. That’s because you won’t get the results you want unless these are handled correctly.
11. Measure Results
Finally, it’s time to assess the success of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you’ll return to those KPIs you set at the start of the content strategy plan, and see what’s changed and whether you’re hitting your targets.
By monitoring your progress, you’ll be able to tweak your content marketing strategy at regular intervals, so it’s always up to date.
That’s it! Now you know how to create a successful content marketing strategy from beginning to end.
Ready to invest in content marketing services that grow your business? Contact us online or call us (+91) 7058126249 today at to speak with a strategist!