3 Top Essentials Of Content Marketing: Importance, Types, and Content Marketing Strategy

Content is king.

You may have heard of this saying before and for a simple reason. It works and it is absolutely critical to the success of any business.

Your customers, audience and your leads all want content that is valuable to them for them to choose and keep choosing your business.

Moreover, you need to deliver that content in a way that feels organic and natural.

With the use of the right content marketing strategies, it is possible to do exactly that. With the right content marketing strategy, it is possible to improve your brand awareness, increase your conversions and boost your revenue. At the same time, you will be establishing your organization as a leader in your specific industry.

This guide to content marketing will help you achieve all of that and more.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing can be said to be the process of planning, making, developing, distributing, sharing, and delivering content to your intended audience.

Done correctly, content marketing can improve factors like brand awareness, brand reach, sales, and loyalty.

These days, outbound marketing strategies are no longer as successful at resonating with your audience and converting them as they used to be. Now, your content must be able to reach the intended audience in a natural manner. In other words, you need inbound strategies. A typical method of doing this is by making a narrative for the content such as a story. In this way, your content will feel a lot more credible, engaging, and customized for your intended audience.

You can check out our guide to content writing to grasp an idea of how to create the content.

Importance of Content Marketing

A content marketing strategy can help your organization in several ways. Some of them are as follows.

• It can inform your prospects and leads about the different products and services that you offer.
• A content marketing strategy improve conversions.
• It can help develop relationships between the business and its customers, resulting in increased loyalty.
• It demonstrates to the audience how the products and services can solve the challenges they face.
• A good content marketing strategy can develop a sense of community centered on the brand.

In the next section of this guide to content marketing, we will take a look at the different kinds of content marketing strategies out there.

Types of Content Marketing

These days, there are various kinds of content marketing which can be used. Your choice will likely depend on several factors. Nonetheless, let us take a look at some of the most widely used content marketing types.

Social Media Content Marketing

There are more than 3.6 billion users of social media all over the world. As such, it is quite easy to understand the reason why organizations continue to put resources into social media marketing. As you may already know, there are several platforms out there. Some examples include Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. Of course, there are also several different ways you can make and offer content on every one of them.

Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics are capable of showing content, data, and information in a straightforward and graphic manner. With a blend of short statements and simple pictures, infographics are a fantastic method to communicate your content effectively. They function admirably in case you're attempting to simplify an instructive as well as complicated theme allowing everyone in the audience to understand it.

Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a ground-breaking kind of inbound content and take into consideration a great deal of creativity as far as their purposes and themes go. With a blog, it is possible to do a number of exciting and useful things. This includes promoting other content as well as your blog articles. This is done by means of links and social share buttons. With blogs, it is easy to incorporate product and service data. Blogs happen to be one of the widely used tools in most content marketing strategies.

Podcast Content Marketing

In a recent survey, it was discovered that 37% of adults in the United States had listened to one or more podcasts within the previous month. This is the reason why many media outlets an even organizations have started making and sharing their podcasts as a part of their content marketing strategy.

Podcasts offer a great deal of creativity and innovation as they can be about any subject or theme. Also, you get to decide different factors identified about the podcast. Some examples include, the episodes, who will be on the podcast and where you publicize the podcast.

Video Content Marketing

According to research, more than 50% of consumers want to view videos created by the brands that they interact with. Moreover, video marketing is capable of improving conversions and the returns on investment. They also help in building relationships with your audience. You also have the freedom to share the video content you have created on different social media platforms and even on your landing pages. In fact, video is a part of many content marketing strategies these days.

Paid Ads Content Marketing

Paid ads are helpful in increasing your reach to a wider audience. They also help you position your organization in all the areas where you wish to be seen. Moreover, paid ads are particularly effective when combined with inbound marketing strategies. These days, you have a lot of choices when it comes to sharing paid ads such as social media platforms, banners, landing pages, and even sponsored content.

In the next part of this guide to content marketing, you will learn what makes a good content marketing strategy.

Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

By developing and implementing a sound content marketing strategy, your efforts can have a massive impact and be effective in lead conversion and in reaching out to your target audience. Here are some of the steps that you can take for your content marketing strategy.

Set the Right Goals

The first step of your guide to content marketing strategy will be to establish the right goals. These goals must be specific to your area of business. This way, they are most likely to support complement the broader marketing goals and the goals of your company. Here are a few examples to help you out.

• Improve the brand awareness
• Improve the revenue
• Improve the conversions
• Improve the brand loyalty
• Improve the customer engagement
• Develop trust among your customers and prospects
• Attract valuable strategic partners for your business

Determine the KPIs

In this step of the content marketing strategy, you will be discovering and setting the key performance indicators for the goals that you established in the last step. Key performance indicators or the KPIs are the quantifiable indicators that can be used for measuring the actual performance of the content marketing strategy against the established goals. Listed below are a few possible KPIs for different goals.

• Brand awareness: Site traffic, followers on social media, and subscription sign-ups
• Revenue: Site traffic and daily sales
• Customer engagement: Likes, follows, shares, backlinks and mentions
• Conversions: Conversion rates and shopping cart abandonment rates

Choose the Type of Content

Now, it is time to select the kind of content that you will be creating. For this, you need to start by considering the target audience of your brand and their buyer personas. Understanding your audience is key to learning what content will work in your favor. Determining the answers to the questions given below about the target audience can help in discovering the right kind of content for your content marketing strategy

• What does your audience require from your brand?
• What are the challenges that they want to overcome?
• Why does your audience require your specific service or product?
• How can your brand help them overcome their challenges?
• Where does your audience spend their time?

After building the buyer personas, you need to determine which kind of content will suit your audience. We have already discussed some of the different kinds of content you can use earlier in this guide to content marketing.

Determine the Content Channels

After determining the content types for your content marketing strategy, you now need to think about the specific content channels that you will use for distributing the content you create. Think about where and how you want your content to be shared and where will it be posted.

In a few cases, the answer will certainly be obvious. For example, for social media content, you will have to post on social media. For video content, YouTube will certainly be a priority.

Determine the Budget

In the next part of your guide to content marketing strategy, you will be fixing your budget. For this, you need to consider the kind of content that you are going to make and the channels that those content will be marketed on. After all, you will want your budget to be effective. You can ask the following questions to get an idea of the budget you will require.

• For content creation, do you require any software or any technology that must be purchased?
• Will content marketers, graphic designers or other skilled professionals need to be hired?
• Will you require specific resources or tools for improving or measuring your content marketing strategy?
• Will you be buying ad space for your content marketing strategy?

Answering questions like these will help you determine what kind of budget will suit your need.

Develop and Publish the Content

In the penultimate step of this guide to content marketing strategy, you will be dealing with the actual process of content creation and delivery. You may find a guide to content writing useful if you are going down that road.

Ultimately, it is about creating and publishing your content in a way that enables your audience to get it easily and possibly even convert.

To guarantee that you're reliably creating and delivering content and then sharing it among your audience and prospects, you can use an editorial content calendar or a social media calendar. This will enable your group to keep track over all the content that are being made. It will also help you in scheduling the content beforehand. There are other tools you can use for the same.

Analyze and Calculate Results

In the final step of the guide to content marketing, it is time to analyze the results of the content marketing strategy and calculate the results. Doing so will help you determine if any changes are necessary to improve your content marketing strategy and the results it generates.

Examine the goals and the KPIs that you have set to determine how successful your content marketing strategy is. Were you able to achieve those goals or how close were you to achieving them? Figuring out the answers will only help your content marketing strategy get better with time.

With an effective content marketing strategy, it is possible to reach and connect with your target audience and thereby increase the conversions. There are several methods of marketing with content for improving revenue, improving brand awareness and building trust and relationships with your customers.

We hope that this guide to content marketing has helped you get a better idea of how to do all of that.

If you are looking for content marketing experts or digital marketing experts, contact Cogito Software now!