Resources
- 15 Powerful Content Marketing Examples To Inspire Your Next Campaign (a very good one)
- Content Strategy Example for Startups
- Creating a Winning Content Strategy for Healthcare Companies
- How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Strategy for Professional Services
- B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2022
- Manufacturing Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends With Insights for 2022
- B2C Marketers: Make Sure You Are on Stable Ground [New Research]
- 3 Ways Top Enterprise Content Marketers Do Things Differently [New Research]
- Tech Marketers Shine But Face a Big Hurdle: Content Operations [New Research]
- 2022 Content Marketing for Demand Generation Survey
- Creating Content for Sales Enablement Survey
Definition
- Content marketing involves creating useful and engaging content across all mediums to organically grow your business, boost your visibility, and increase sales.
- getting the right content, to the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
- guides the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content
- an integrated set of user-centered, goal-driven choices about content throughout its lifecycle.
- connects your organization’s content efforts with business goals and user needs. Everything you do related to content should map back to those requirements
- an organization’s high-level approach for creating and marketing content
- creating content includes topic selection, content formats, writing style, design and promotion.
- the development, planning, creation, delivery and management of content
- Content strategy is the ongoing process of transforming business objectives and goals into a plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals.
- Content strategy is the higher-level planning process. In comparison, content marketing is the nuts-and-bolts process of creating, publishing, and promoting content.
- a plan in which you use content (audio, visual, and/or written) to achieve your business goals
- a content creation and deployment plan to achieve business goals
- It outlines the decision-making process behind whom your material will impact, how it will cut through all of the noise, and what you hope to achieve in smaller, more measurable metrics – defining content success.
- Content strategy is the discipline responsible for satisfying business requirements through content creation and distribution.
- Content Strategy is the development, planning, creation, delivery and management of content
- to create meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable content that attracts the company’s target customers.
- Identifying your uncommon value and communicating it successfully
- Content strategy is the ongoing process of translating business objectives and goals into a plan that uses content as a primary means of achieving those goals.
Purpose
- Your goal with your content marketing strategy should not be to close sales, but to build trust. To establish trust, your content should be valuable and useful, whether or not someone decides to buy your specific offering.
- you’ll be directionless without a content strategy, chasing whatever new shiny object enters your line of sight.
- create meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable content that attracts the company’s target customers
- In today’s social web environment, getting the right message to the right customer at the right time is crucial. Reaching those all-important touch points requires brand-specific content strategy and tactics.
- Content strategy doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s not just building an editorial calendar, writing content, and publishing it. It’s not having a blog, even if it’s full of great content. It’s not putting out a one-off content piece here and there based on sales or product teams’ requests.
- If your content strategy doesn’t start with a business objective, it’s not a content strategy. It’s just content.
- muddled messaging, unnatural or “keyword stuffed” writing, and content that lacks any clear CTA or purpose. Poorly-timed marketing campaigns which are insensitive to current news always fall short, too.
- Whether it’s an informative blog post or an eye-catching graphic, all good content serves a purpose. It tells a story and reinforces a company’s brand identity. Great content marketing allows a brand to connect with its audience, so look for authenticity, professionalism, and strong messaging with a clear CTA or desired result.
- getting the right message to the right customer at the right time
- A successful content strategy will attract your target audience at every stage of the funnel and keep them engaged even after a purchase.
- a good content strategy is the foundation of your Attract and Delight stages in a buyer’s journey that follows the inbound marketing framework.
- If executed well, it’s one of the most critical marketing components that can determine success.
- A good strategy sets a roadmap to plan, create, and manage content. It guides all of your marketing assets and supports ongoing content lifecycle management to meet your critical business initiatives. Organising, scheduling, generating, publishing, and promoting content pieces all fall under the content strategy umbrella.
- Content strategy is a more advanced business activity than a marketing strategy. While a marketing strategy outlines the marketing steps you’ll take towards your ultimate goals, like growth and increasing revenue, a content strategy focuses on defining which content is created to support this marketing strategy, as well as how you’ll promote it.
- Content strategists must be able to understand business requirements
Why is it important
- Companies that focus on creating high-quality content marketing materials see an increase in the quality of leads, shortened sales cycles, and increased close rates.
- One of the biggest benefits of content marketing is that it has the power to turn you into a thought leader
- helps you plan your site’s content marketing. Without a strategy, many people jump from one tactic to another. One week they write blog posts. The next week they film some YouTube videos.
- If you want to rank high in Google, you need quality content. You also need good content so when people visit your website, they want to convert. Sloppy or visually unappealing content may turn off your potential customers.
- Quality content attracts customers, engages them and builds trust.
- Quality content allows you reach the customers you want without being blocked. Ad blocking software is used by 30% of Internet users, which loosely translated means that a quarter of paid advertising messages will never reach their audiences.
- Quality content helps consumers remember a brand (business or individual) and encourages them to engage more personally with the company or individual
- Quality content increases search visibility and authority.
- Ongoing useful information is your brand’s biggest asset
- Who will be reading your content?
- What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?
- What makes you unique?
- What content formats will you focus on?
- What channels will you publish on?
- How will you manage content creation and publication?
- What do we bring to the table? (Why do people choose us over our competitor?)
- What benefits does our brand promise to deliver?
- Who are our target customers?
- What do we hear our customers saying? (What are their common questions, needs and concerns?)
- What’s the purpose of our content? (build authority, increase awareness, engage customers, get conversions, etc.)
- What content do we already have in place to educate, promote and build trust?
- What resources do we have right now to carry out our marketing?
- What do we need, if resources are lacking, in order to reach our goals?
- Who will create and maintain our content?
- What forms of content are we the most comfortable with?
- Where will our content reside (what platform will you build from)?
- How often should we publish?
- Where will we distribute our content?
- What are the KPIs for each type of content we publish?
- What is our target audience for the different types of content we will produce?
- What does a content audit of our site tell us about the existing content we have and our gaps?
- How will we source content ideas?
- How will we ensure they align with our brand voice, goals, and audiences?
- What content formats are we best suited to produce? Maybe your content team can put together a mean blog post but lacks the skills to create high-quality videos. If so, you know where you’ll be more likely to stand out.
How will we ensure we have a documented strategy and governance, rather than relying on ad hoc requests for content?
How will we distribute content? - How can we ensure our email, influencer outreach, and social media content strategy supports our overall content marketing effort?
- What do we want our content to accomplish in pursuit of our business goals?
- What are the KPIs for each type of content we publish?
- What is our target audience for the different types of content we will produce?
- What does a content audit of our site tell us about the existing content we have and our gaps?
- How will we source content ideas? How will we ensure they align with our brand voice, goals, and audiences?
- What content formats are we best suited to produce? Maybe your content team can put together a mean blog post but lacks the skills to create high-quality videos. If so, you know where you’ll be more likely to stand out.
- How will we ensure we have a documented strategy and governance, rather than relying on ad hoc requests for content?
- How will we distribute content? How can we ensure our email, influencer outreach, and social media content strategy supports our overall content marketing effort?
- Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.
- The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content.
- Plus, your content won’t just help attract leads, it will also educate your prospects and generate awareness for your brand.
- without a well-defined content strategy, you’ll waste time writing, designing, and publishing content, which is likely to have a negative impact on both your audience and budget.
- the right content with the wrong purpose won’t drive consistent results
- Appropriate. It matches the needs of the audience and the business.
- Useful. It has a defined purpose, and it fulfills that purpose.
- User-centered. The audience is the primary consumer of the content, and its substance should reflect this.
- Clear. It meets the audience where they are.
- Consistent. It reflects the style or tone of the business.
- Concise.
- Supported. There should be processes in place to prevent content from withering on the vine.
- attracts customers, engages them and builds trust
- allows you reach the customers you want without being blocked
- helps consumers remember a brand (business or individual) and encourages them to engage more personally
- increases search visibility and authority
- Content is vital for businesses today as a means of attracting potential customers without relying on traditional “push” advertising techniques. Digital content allows potential customers to discover and engage with you organically. As they search for topics and concepts relevant to what they want to do or know, they find you and dive deeper at their leisure.
- It’s content that helps people learn something new, solve their problems, do better work, and ultimately find solutions that help them reach their goals.
We don’t publish content about social media marketing because it doesn’t align with the use of our product. Anything we post on that topic would quickly lose relevance for our audience, even if it is sound. Any definition of “quality content” has to take this into account.
Content marketing strategy, content strategy, and content plan
- content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating content, who you are helping, and how you will help them in a way no one else can. Organizations typically use content marketing to build an audience and to achieve at least one of these profitable results: increased revenue, lower costs, or better customers.
- content strategy delves deeper into (in Kristina Halvorson’s words) the “creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” Note that content strategy often goes beyond the scope of a content marketing strategy, as it helps businesses manage all of the content they have.
- a content plan is very tactical. It documents the specifics of how you will execute your strategy, and who on your team will be handling each task. It’s important to understand that you need a content marketing strategy BEFORE you build your content plan. Think of it as a marketing plan that specifically relates to content; thus, it should include details such as the key topic areas you will cover, what content you will create, when and how to share your content, and specific calls to action you will include.
How to measure results - Google Analytics
Go to Neil Patel’s article for Details
- Consumption Metrics
- Social Sharing Metrics
- Lead Metrics
- Sales Metrics
Notes
- Identifying your uncommon value and communicating it successfully is content strategy.
- That’s not to say that your strategy should be set in stone. You can, and should, modify your strategy based on what’s working for you
- focus on producing quality content, engaging with your audience, and measuring your successes and failures
- keep siloed teams on the same page, minimize duplicated efforts, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same content goals
- content as a business asset that requires strategic consideration at every point along its lifecycle
- When you have inconsistent content across channels and platforms, your brand suffers
- write in the simplest way to help our users do things that are often complex
- make sure the words we use are both clear and accurate