Content marketing has been around for some time now and is on the rise. More and more businesses are looking to content marketing as a way to engage potential customers and boost sales.
It’s a pretty simple idea really: Create content, drive traffic, increase sales. Easy, right? Yes, but still so many people are doing it the wrong way. Creating content just for the sake of creating content doesn’t really cut it. You need to create content that is entertaining and useful, not just filler to try and boost your SEO value. After all it is people who will be making the purchasing decisions, not robots, so your content should be relevant to their needs.
Whether your in B2C or B2B, this content strategy outline should help you in your initiatives:
Step 1: Know your consumers
Before you begin any marketing campaign, it’s important to know your consumers. Understand the who, what, where, and why of your consumers. Enlist the help of your internal research department or a third party social market research solution to help understand your consumers better.
- Who are they?
- What are they interested in?
- Where are they located? (Online & Geo)
- Why do they need our products/services?
Step 2: Ask yourself what type content do we need?
Once you know more about your consumer, you need to think about what type of content would be appealing to them? You can experiment with content marketing ‘playgrounds’ as Andrew Hannelly from Social Media Explorer called them. Do a little bit of experimenting and see how consumers react to certain types of content. Try an interesting youtube video, or a guest blog post and gauge consumer reaction to test the waters a little bit.
Step 3: Plan your content
This is possibly the most important part of any content strategy. Planning is key in content marketing as the nuances of daily business and fire-drills will almost always interrupt your content strategy. It’s very important to plan times to develop your content and have a proofing/approval and milestone process in place that fits into the schedule of your entire team.
Step 4: Deliver content
Get your content out there. You can’t get views, engagement, and sales if your content isn’t visible. Utilize all available channels to cross-promote content. If you’ve posted a new article on your blog, tweet about it and put it on your facebook page. If you’ve released a new tutorial on youtube, put it on your blog. There are a lot of channels available, make use of them all. Remember not to over-do it though, no one likes a spammer.
Step 5: Stay Engaged
Once you release content, don’t just walk away. Stay engaged with your consumers: Answer questions, RT other articles, ask for opinions, and build a following. Those who you connect with may not be a customer today, but they may be tomorrow, so stay engaged.
Step 6: Measure, adjust, adapt
Measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing initiatives can be tricky, but it all comes down to one thing: Sales & Leads. Web analytics & traffic stats are great to tell you if people are viewing your content and can identify a problem somewhere else (landing page design, marketing messages, etc) but at the end of the day it’s all about generating revenue.
