Content marketing is a popular tool for attracting and communicating with customers. Young brands believe that content marketing is publishing articles on the company's blog and optimizing the site for search engine results, but that's not all.
What is content marketing, how to implement it in business, and why not all brands use such an "effective" tool - in our article.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a tool for attracting new customers and communicating with them through the distribution of useful content.
This is not mindless posting of publicly available materials. Content marketing works if you create unique and expert material for the niche of your business. In practice, it looks like this: a user searches for information on the Internet, comes across your blog material, solves a "pain point" with its help, subscribes to the newsletter, begins to trust the brand, and becomes a customer. When content marketing is properly implemented in your business, you will receive:
- an additional audience;
- brand promotion;
- user trust;
- attraction of traffic to the site;
- increase in sales.
Content marketing is a game of "debt": first you build a brand reputation, and then increase the audience's interest and sales.
In what form should you prepare content?
Content marketing does not dictate rules for presenting useful material. It can be distributed in any format: write cool cases, articles, and news, draw infographics, publish reports and survey results, and record podcasts and video tutorials. The main thing is that customers receive useful material.
Content can be divided into news, useful (for business development), and entertaining. You don’t need to say in every article or podcast “…we have a cool website and products, come and buy. We are here for free… for you…”. If you regularly distribute free and useful content, it will indirectly encourage customers to buy.
Stages of implementing a content strategy in business
A content strategy includes all the nuances of materials, dates, and platforms for publications for a certain period (most often a month).
Target Audience Analysis
If you don't know who the content is useful for (and whether it is useful at all), don't proceed to the next steps. Determine who your client is, what resources they use, and what "pain points" you solve with the help of content. It is advisable to analyze competitors in your niche.
Creating a content plan
A content plan is a document that outlines all the details: when there will be publications, on what topics, in what format, and on which platforms. If you write SEO texts, include key phrases in the content plan for preparing each topic. A content plan helps avoid chaos when preparing and posting materials.
Content marketing is the systematic distribution of materials. Often, young brands believe that content marketing does not bear fruit and is useless. The secret is that the method of attracting customers through useful materials does not work immediately: traffic to the site and sales begin to grow after at least 5 months, and if you publish unnecessary content, it will not bring results at all.
How to choose topics for a content plan
You can identify interesting topics for users using Google Trends. You can also analyze the main search queries using one of the SEO services.
Let's look at the example of the Serpstat service:
- We write a key phrase on the site (for example, "building a sales department").
- We select the country and search engine (Ukraine, Google.com), and click "Search".
- We get an analysis of the frequency of queries by clusters.
Now you know which queries in your niche are the most popular. Based on this data, create topics for writing articles, recording podcasts, video tutorials, or instructions. For example, if the most frequent query is “building a sales department from scratch,” you can write a detailed step-by-step guide “How to build an effective sales department from scratch.”
Selection of specialists
You can do the first two points yourself, but the rest will be difficult without a team of specialists. Imagine that you are putting on a play: you need to distribute roles for all the actors and evaluate their training and the picture as a whole. If the play is good, the audience will applaud standing up; if it turned out so-so, get ready to dodge tomatoes.
A marketer, editor, designer, and SMM specialist are required to participate in creating a content plan. Each of them is responsible for the quality of the final result: the marketer analyzes and selects ideas for publications, the editor controls the quality and expertise of the copywriter's texts, the designer works on the visual component of posts (creates diagrams, infographics, banners), and the SMM specialist chooses the time of publications, methods of content seeding, and interaction with the audience.
It is better to connect copywriters who know the topic: they will write material faster and better than those who will understand the topic from scratch. If you plan to publish frequently, you can involve several authors to speed up the process.
Systematic posting
Content marketing is not just publishing articles on your website. We recommend publishing content on your website, on social networks and other external resources (even on a paid basis), and creating email newsletters.
Organics does not provide a large reach of publications, so use targeted advertising to promote your content, otherwise it will remain unnoticed.
Posting should not be chaotic, but systematic. You can use automatic posting services to simplify this task. Here are a few of them: Hootsuite, Buffer, and Parasite. The first two can post to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and the third - only to Instagram.
How to check the effectiveness of a content strategy
Some believe that it is unreasonable to measure the effectiveness of a content strategy because it is not a quantitative, but a qualitative tool. You can still measure effectiveness using metrics such as reach, user activity, number of article views, traffic to the site, and sales.
Use data from Google Analytics and Facebook's advertising department. The most organic views and interactions will be in the first 2-3 days, and then everything depends on the work of the herpetologist and SMM manager (seeding materials in different communities). Pay attention to social metrics - likes, reposts, comments.
Why content marketing doesn't work
There are different reasons. The first is using content marketing for other purposes. If you need sales, registrations, and customer contacts, use landing pages, and contextual and targeted advertising.
The second reason is the chaotic "throwing" of content into the network. Content marketing does not bring results quickly: you will have to systematically share content and not receive feedback for a long time. Therefore, all brands know about content marketing but do not use it to promote their business.
*At first, you will have to spend a lot of time launching content marketing, but then it will be easier: with minimal costs, the tool will bring good results.
The third reason is copy-paste content. User requirements for content are growing, so if you want your content to be appreciated, offer unique articles and cases.
