Content Marketing Strategy

Le Content marketing is the creation and distribution of digital marketing materials with the goal of increasing brand awareness, improving search engine rankings, and generating audience interest.

Companies use it to feed prospects and enable sales using website analytics, keyword research and targeted strategy recommendations. Content marketing is therefore a long-term strategy.

In this article, I show you how to put together a content marketing strategy. Why is content marketing so important for business? But before, here is a training that allows you to improve your conversion rate on your online store.

???? Why content marketing is important

You may be carefully rethinking your content right now. Big changes have disrupted virtually every industry. Content marketing is not new.

It has gained prominence over the past decade and its acceptance as a critical strategy is growing. This is particularly true in relation to to the “failures” of traditional marketing, which is now more ignored than watched.

Now the playing field is more level. Businesses don't have to invest millions in ads to get noticed.

Instead, they can use content marketing to build community and offer a refreshing new take on old issues to their audience.

Content marketing is important because your customers say so. Maybe not verbally, but statistics and data on how much content buyers consume backs up that claim. No one wants to be sold, regardless of the makeup of the audience. They want to be informed and engaged.

They respond much more to a story that shows them how to overcome their challenges than to a dry, disjointed approach that can play on fear. Buyers are always looking for valuable content. Here are the steps to building a content marketing strategy

✔️ Step 1: Create your key personality profiles

What type of content do you need? Your buyer personas will help you define your audience – their challenges, questions, needs, and the type of content they like to consume.

Its buying steps tell you what each piece of content should accomplish.

✔️ Step 2: Understand your buyer's journey

A buyer's journey maps a buyer's decision-making process when making a purchase and will help you determine what content you need. Different types of content appeal to different buyers at different stages of their journey.

By mapping your buying stages, you will better understand the process by which buyers consider your product or service.

As a result, you'll be able to develop a content strategy that speaks directly to buyers, no matter what stage they're in.

✔️ Step 3: Create your content marketing

Planning and creating new content is about more than mapping and metrics. THE brainstorming and asset planning can be one of the hardest and most important parts of content creation.

To find inspiration when it strikes, you need a receptive environment and the whole team's willingness to try new things.

An editorial calendar isn't just where you track, coordinate, and share your upcoming content. It's a strategic tool that helps your team run integrated programs that include your content.

Maintaining an editorial calendar ensures that you publish your content at the best possible time and that your entire team is aligned around release dates.

✔️ Step 4: Produce and optimize your content

If you start with original, high-quality content that you have invested real time and money to create, you'll want to get the most out of each asset. You'll also want to make sure your content stays up to date.

Obsolete content, which is no longer relevant, harms the credibility of your brand. To ensure you get the most out of your content marketing, remember the three Rs :

Rearrange: it's not only an effective way to deliver new content, it's also a smart way to reach members of your audience who enjoy consuming content in different ways.

Some people you market to may like e-books, while others prefer infographics, and still others learn best from slides. Slicing and dicing lets you reach more people with less effort.

Rewrite : whenever an asset shows consistently high performance, reserve it for a future update. Eventually, the number of engagements will start to drop, a good sign that it's time to update.

To retire : even the best content doesn't last forever. If a piece of content needs help beyond a design refresh or simple update, it might be time to remove it.

Content that is past its expiration date harms the authority and credibility of your business, undoing all the good work your content did.

✔️ Step 5: Launch and optimize your strategy content marketing

Content at each stage of the funnel should be measured differently. After all, each stage has different goals. Here are the basic metrics for start, middle, and end content:

Initial measurements are not directly linked to income. The goal of your early-stage content is to build brand awareness; create a preference for your brand; and educate, entertain and engage your audience.

Shares, downloads, and views tell you if your content is getting attention and if people like what they see.

Intermediate and advanced metrics such as funnels, opportunities, and revenue distribution give you insight into how your content affects deals.

For mid-stage assets, you'll want to measure how your content is generating new interest and affecting your profits.

???? Content Marketing Strategy Tips

Researching what content marketing is and how to leverage it comes down to executing your strategy. Maybe you already have one, but it got derailed by the pandemic.

As stated, your content marketing strategy should be nimble no matter what. Most disruptions are unpredictable, but here are some things you can do now to use content marketing to continue cultivating connections with your audience.

✔️ Use LinkedIn to support your B2B content marketing

LinkedIn has cemented its position as the social media site for B2B businesses. Its importance is supported by the fact that 94% of specialists B2B marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing.

But how can you use LinkedIn more effectively in your content marketing strategy? LinkedIn has advantages over other social media sites. These benefits are just as essential today as they were in 2019, including:

Better targeting

Ce who is great with LinkedIn, is that it's a place where you can find decision-makers at all levels of a company. You can target based on both job titles and demographics.

Across its millions of users, LinkedIn even breaks down influence levels, allowing you to focus on those who ultimately determine purchasing decisions.

Why is it even more important now? Because people still use the site a lot to find answers to new problems – problems they hadn't considered until now.

Think of the company that now needs to transition to a remote workforce. They have a lot of worries, and the companies that can offer them the technology may be the answer.

✔️ Strategy alignment

Before you start trying anything new on LinkedIn or getting started, you need to make sure that how you use it matches your content strategy.

• Why do you use it? Opinion leadership, lead generation, awareness?
• How do you use it to drive traffic? Where do you want them to go?
• How will you interact with customers, partners and industry experts on site? And how will it help you achieve your content marketing goals?

✔️ Optimizing content marketing for e-commerce

E-commerce retailers are now in a new boat. Even though they had physical locations, online shopping demand is now the only channel for most.

While it may seem that e-commerce and content marketing don't mix, many online sellers are taking advantage of it. They discovered that optimizing content for their e-commerce brand can lead to success.

This is also true for B2B e-commerce. B2B e-commerce is expected to reach $1,8 trillion by 2022. Why this growth, which may actually outpace B2C e-commerce?

This is largely due to the evolution of a B2B buyer. They are digital natives and appreciate the convenience of shopping online and are looking for content to support their buying decisions.

???? Evaluate the performance of your strategy

Now that we've discussed what content marketing is and how to implement it, it's time to talk about how you can measure its performance.

Once you have a strategy that makes noise and you're rolling out meaningful, high-quality content, you need to pay attention to these content performance metrics.

✔️ Define content marketing KPIs

When you define your key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing efforts, it's different from answering the question of ROI.

KPIs focus on the operational side of content marketing. The most important aspect of KPIs is your “ Why ". Why do you do what you do? This is what people buy – ​​not what you do. Here are some KPIs to consider:

Measure the impact of a content marketing campaign on the productivity of your sales team: does your sales team understand the objectives of the campaign and why it would provide them with leads? If you have a disconnect here, leads won't turn into conversions.

Understanding the percentage of customers generated by marketing: knowing what new business has been won through content marketing shows its influence.

Revenue Generation Timeframe: how long does a campaign need to generate interest? If the time seems long, you need context (i.e. is your solution buying cycle long, have you built urgency into your campaign?).

Customer acquisition costs (CAC): calculating the CAC for each campaign provides key insights on how to streamline operations to reduce them.

What metric indicators for performance evaluation?

After defining the KPIs, you should pay attention to these key metrics:

✔️ Trafic

Look at users, pageviews and unique pageviews in Google Analytics.

Find out where your traffic is coming from and make changes based on that. For example, if the referral traffic is coming from your Pinterest page, you should consider developing more content for the site.

✔️ Conversions

Is your content generating conversions? It's a simple question, but not a linear answer. You can see from the traffic that your content is getting more attention, but what do they do next?

Determine how you can tie conversions, however you define them, to content to understand its sphere of influence.

✔️ Commitment

Traffic is excellent; engagement is better. Engagement happens when people spend more time on your site and the number of pages they view during a visit. These are all metrics you can find on Google Analytics.

Another element of engagement is what you do on social media. Does your content generate reactions, is it shared and commented on ? The more this happens, the more likely it is to generate more credible traffic.

✔️ SEO

Organic search rankings are essential to a healthy content marketing strategy.

Keywords are important because that’s how your audience searches for answers. You need to constantly monitor your keyword performance, including your current position for each keyword you have targeted.

At least check it all 30 days. See where you go up and down and find out why. It is also imperative to optimize each piece of content, including having correct metadata, as well as a good keyword/content ratio.

✔️ Authority

Authority is not easy to measure, compared to the other measures described. The goal is for your website to have a strong domain authority (DA), which is a number between 1 and 100. The higher the score, the greater the authority.

Building Authority improves SEO and conversions and is measured by Google. Google looks at things like backlinks of sites with good DA, as well as the quantity of content shared, which Google would consider as an illustration of the quality of the content.

???? Frequently Asked Content Marketing Questions

When working with brands in the business landscape, there are a few questions that come up again and again. What is content marketing? Why is it important? Who should care? What should they do about it.

This reminds me of the classic journalism approach of answering the who? What ? When ? Or ? For what ? and how ? questions to get to the bottom of every good story. So here is my attempt to answer these fundamental questions.

✔️ Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is important because the world has changed drastically since we started carrying all information over the internet. Add to that the ability to connect with anyone in the world at any time, with social networks and our cell phones.

Traditional marketing is broken. TV commercials are increasingly ignored. Advertising doesn't work for publishers or brands because we've been taught to ignore it.

Brands need a new way to connect with their audience. The approach that works is the continuous creation of content that people want. It's content marketing.

✔️ Who should care about content marketing?

Strategic digital marketers all need to understand the importance of content marketing.

They should be able to define it, be able to explain why it's important in the world today's digital + social + mobile. They should be able to discuss how to do this in their organizations.

✔️ What is the biggest mistake content marketers make?

The biggest mistake marketers make is thinking that this is just another tactic where you can promote yourself. We did it with social.

As Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter emerged, brands began running the same old ads they used on more traditional channels.

But social media is just the plumbing. It is the content that fuels social connections. Content that people want to consume and share.

So many marketers think in terms of campaigns and promotions. When their audience is looking for stories – entertainment that makes them smarter, makes them laugh or inspires them in some way. Effective brands retreat from history.

✔️ How can a brand get started in content marketing?

Brands usually start because they see their marketing efforts suffer and they see their competitors taking leading positions as publishers in their markets.

Brands should start by trying to understand who they are trying to reach and how their brand can help that target audience. You should then start to identify the questions your customers have, the content they consume and the places they hang out online.

Then, start developing a strategy to help the client meet those customers' needs with content – ​​delivered regularly, across many channels and types.

✔️ When should a brand get into content marketing?

Every business, regardless of size or revenue, must do this. Otherwise, they risk losing market share by losing mindshare to competitors.

You can start by as little as 30 days. We would be happy to help you. In 90 days, you could be a leader on certain topics. In a year, you could start to see a return on your investments. Or even sooner depending on how you run.

In 3-5 years, the efforts of your content marketing strategy could become the biggest source of value that the marketing organization brings to the brand.

✔️ What are the common barriers to success with this type of marketing?

Common barriers to success, besides fear and lack of courage to change, are leadership support from above.

Content marketing should be a leadership-led initiative at the company. The next thing is usually skills. Training and enablement is one of the primary responsibilities of the content marketer because content is created throughout the organization.

Finally, brands need technology to manage the flow of content between their employees and all the channels they manage. This is the only way for content marketing to scale enterprise-wide.

✔️ How to Overcome Content Marketing Obstacles?

Strategies to help brands take off include competitive assessment or social listening to determine if your brand is losing market share where it matters – on the digital, social and mobile web. Additionally, brands need to look at their content inventory and see if it is performing well.

Finally, marketers need to divert investment away from tactics that aren't working. This does not mean that advertising will ever disappear. But we see many brands diverting their investment from paid advertising to content marketing.

✔️ What should a business do to be successful with its content marketing strategy?

The most important element of successful content marketing is a customer-centric culture that seeks to meet the needs of its customers. It's that "higher purpose" that resonates with customers.

We're smart enough to see through brands that try to feign a desire to be helpful rather than promotional.

The second thing is the ability to create engaging content that answers your customers' most important questions.

The brands that are able to cut through all the clutter and noise in our information-saturated society aren't the ones with the biggest budget, or the fanciest advertising agency.

It's the brand that can create content that captures our attention, on a human level, that wins the hearts and minds of their desired audience.

The third thing is entrepreneurship. Effective content marketing constantly reiterates many ideas. Therefore it must be continuous. Most things you try will fail. But each failure gives insight into what works.

And that spirit is the foundation for creating breakthrough content that reaches more people than you thought possible.

✔️ What future for this type of marketing?

Businesses need to plan for the future. So we must be ready for entertaining content, visual and fun that can evolve.

The future of content marketing is more human interaction. You'll see brands tapping into their employees to reach customers, often via social media. Today, brands hire actors.

You'll see brands creating a lot more video content, and even sponsoring content more commonly created by entertainment companies.

To stand out, many brands are starting to build production houses to create entertaining, even funny content. Imagine that for a B2B brand?

???? In short

At the end of this article, we understand that content marketing is now essential for any digital strategy that aims to be effective. Whether it's blogs, ebooks, podcasts or videos, content helps feed your audience and guide them towards purchasing.

But success in content marketing requires method and consistency in the production of assets. Analyzing your data, identifying promising topics, optimizing your content and taking care of your SEO are all key steps.

Above all, it is essential to adopt a logic of continuous test & learn to identify the formats and themes generating the maximum conversions. Content marketing must above all be driven by data and not by intuition.

Thanks to this scientific approach focused on customer needs, there is no doubt that the months and years to come will confirm the predominant place of content within digital marketing strategies. Storytelling still has a bright future ahead of it!

But before I leave you, I leave you with this premium training that allows you to better reference your website or online store.

Share with us your experience in the comments.