How Will I Start Content Writing - A Step By Step Guide To Content Marketing For Beginners

Content writing is the process of planning, writing, and editing web content, typically for digital marketing purposes. Whereas Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience.

As a business, this tactic can help you improve brand awareness, boost sales, connect with your target audience members, and engage prospects and customers. Contents are considered as the main part of digital marketing since words are the best way to describe the thoughts that create your brand.

What Is Content Marketing?

According to the oxford dictionary, Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

Content Marketing is also defined as :

The Content Marketing Institute is an online resource where you can find all kinds of information related to content marketing. The platform defines content marketing as:

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

These 4 characteristics can define content marketing in the best way.

According to Thomas Barregren, the following principles constitute necessary criteria to qualify content marketing.

1. Content marketing is marketing with content that a target audience finds relevant and valuable.
2. Content marketing is content published on the owned platform and distributed in owned, paid, and earned media.
3. Content marketing is a systematic approach to continuously publish and distribute content.
4. Content marketing is building trust capital that can be used to change or enhance the behavior of a target audience.

The definition is taken from the Content Marketing resource page: https://heidicohen.com/content-marketing-definition/

Why Is Content Marketing Important?

Content marketing is a  visual treat by creating relevant information pieces so that the target audience can learn about your brand, services, and products. Contents are craeted with the aim to find a solution to the pain points of the audience and solving their issues.

1. Content marketing is important because it answers the queries of the audience
2. You can easily build the trust of your audience and improve conversions
3. It can increase audience retention to your website
4. Content Marketing can attract customers more than anything else
5. Content Marketing is one of the cost-saving measures to boost your company image
6. Content marketing is the present and future of marketing

We all know how much we hate getting disturbed by calls from companies trying to do direct selling. Similarly, we also do not look at the emails from marketers who are trying to directly sell their products. Therefore, it is very natural that the audience will not read contents that tend to do direct selling. But they do rely on one company that provides information and interesting facts, tips, and tricks.

Types Of Content Marketing

Content marketing is usually done with unique contents of different types blogging, podcasting, creating videos, emails, ebooks, lead magnets and many more. Mentioned below are the types of content used in Content Marketing:

1. Web pages: The website consists of web pages like HOME, ABOUT US of the business or company, SERVICES, TESTIMONIALS, REVIEWS, and more. Each of the pages must have relevant content according to what services or products the business offers.
2. Blogs and articles: Blogs offer information regarding the products and services and are something through which the audience or customers can benefits. Informative blogs are more like self-help, they can read the blogs and learn many facts. Long blogs allow brands to answer the queries asked by customers and is also give a  golden opportunity to the content writers to implement the keywords and gaining inbound links. Blogs that are written with the topics related to the common searches are likely to be visited more often.
3. Infographics: Infographics is a type of content that contains information along with graphics. You can create great information and statistics that are easier to read. Moreover, visuals explain the facts effectively and help on driving in more traffics to the site.
4. Ebooks and PDFs: ebooks and PDFs allow brands to explain topics and offer a detailed insight. Moreover, those who want to do self-learning and are looking for resources ebooks can help them nourish their knowledge. Moreover, the PDFs and ebooks are easily downloadable therefore, you can download it and use it for study purposes.
5. Email Newsletter: We all are aware of email marketing right! But email marketing has a  lot to do about creating informative, and attractive messages to turn cold leads into warm leads. You can share freebies or ebooks through email marketing to ensure that the customers can benefit from your brand. In case you want more details related to email marketing read our blog on 5 Steps To Creating A Quality Email List.
6. Videos: Mark Zuckerberg the CEO of Facebook had once gone on record remarking that online content will be in the form of videos in the future. Videos are very eased to access and you can easily draw in a lot of information only by watching and hearing it. 88% of the marketers believe that videos provide them better ROI. Video marketers always look for good content to attract customers. This has made influencers in social media come into popularity. Influencers get the best content and through videos, they try to entertain and also provide information.

Go through our beginner's guide to content marketing to know more details about the types of content used in Content Marketing.

How To Build A  Solid Content Marketing Strategy?

The Content Marketing Strategy building includes three stages:

1. The before implement action
2. During the implementation
3. After the implementation

Let's Discuss each of the stages

STAGE 1 – BEFORE IMPLEMENTATION

START WITH QUESTIONS

1. Start with questions “WHY”, “What”, “How”
2. Select the right solutions with discussions
3. Set the objectives to the success of your contents

(Objectives includes setting goals on what your company wants to achieve through Content Marketing)

DEFINE THE AUDIENCE

1. Research on the target audience,
2. Who you are going to attract with your content,
3. Who will be interested in your services?
4. What are they interested in reading?
5. Are they interested in reading content, watching videos, reading reviews?
6. Keep asking questions and define your target audience and their Goals

STAGE 2: CREATE A PLAN AND START IMPLEMENTING IT

1. Once you set the objectives you can easily create a Content Marketing plan
2. Start with creating contents like blogs, reviews, social media  posts
3. Create a  layout of your content with the highlighted points
4. Include statistics and quotes to influence customers
5. Work with both keyword-based and generic posts alternatively for organic ranking
6. Create a  content calendar with the date and time when you will be making their posts
7. Do not forget to implement call to actions  on your posts and asking for feedback and comments

STAGE 3: AFTER IMPLEMENTATION

TEST AND ANALYZE

1. Content marketing does not end upon making the posts live
2. Make sure that you test, analyze and re-edit the contents
3. The marketing is fast evolving and therefore, every day you get new changes
4. Make sure that your content is updated and feasible
5. Test the contents on Google analytics for impressions, and clicks
6. Keep analyzing the performance of the contents
7. Try to enhance the content with more information
8. Create related posts to provide the readers with more information

What To Include In A Content Marketing Strategy?

In research conducted by Hubspot in 2020, it has been found that 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. Also in another research held by SEMrush, 2019 it has been found that 78% of companies have a team of one-to-three content specialists.

Over 40% of marketers believe that content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy. (Statistics are taken from a Hubspot)

Since we came to know the importance of content marketing let us have a look at a few points to create a consistent content marketing strategy that can boost conversions.

1. Smartly Choose your content channels: Whether it is marketing through social channels, through email marketing, or Pay Per Click, you must choose your marketing channels wisely depending on your target market and target audience.
2. Decide the type of contents you want to publish: The content marketing start must include details about the type of contents you want to publish in a  month and its number, and when exactly you want to publish. Make a  layout of the number of web blogs, infographics, Guest Blogs, web 2.0, articles, classified contents, bookmarking, press release, social media marketing contents and distribute them with the content writer and SEO experts of your company.
3. Set a  budget: Setting a  budget is essential to measure the investment and return of your business. A particular budget can help you to plan the projects effectively and also invest in campaigns that are very essential for online promotion. The charge sheet of content writing varies from company to company. Therefore, as a  business owner, you must try to work with a  company that suits your budget and offers you the best strategy.
4. Distribute the contents for link generation: Distributing the contents at top sites is very essential for ranking. Contributing informative articles and blogs to top blogging sites not only gives you strong backlinks but help you grow your brand. Link building provides search engine the correct cues as to what your business is all about. A link is confidence to your site, therefore, you must continue link building to increase brand awareness and revenue.
5. Analyze and measure the results: Content Marketing does not end once you upload your posts ion the platform, rather there are a  lot of tasks that you must carry on for healthy results. Keep checking your blog on Google analytics and make a  note of the impressions the link is getting. Also, check the clicks on the blog post and search for ways of improving the post. Insert new topics and keywords, so that the customers can benefit from the post.

How Powerful Contents Are Beneficial For The Business

The content marketing efforts that you put to your business will give you more traffic and better Return On Interest if properly planned and executed.

Mentioned below are a  few benefits of powerful content.

1. Drive-in traffic to landing pages
2. Spreading awareness
3. Building a relationship with the customers
4. Bringing in more revenue and profits
5. Generating backlinks and social shares

Here are the two important aspects of web content:

Quality: Quality refers to the standard of the text. The content whether it’s a landing page, and an on-page blog, or an off-page blog must be well written so that visitors can clearly understand what the website is all about. The content should be rich in keywords, interesting, and informative. The people reading the content must feel that they are connecting with the website and are learning about the services or products of the website.

Quantity: Quantity means that your website must be updated with various contents regularly. The content must be updated at regular intervals. There must be blogs and descriptions, describing all the products and services of the website.

Essential elements of high-quality content

• The appropriate length of content: People have no time to read word by word of your content. So, put the main information first. Give a complete summary in the first paragraph followed by descriptions in the following paragraphs. Information that is most important to the web visitors must be kept simple. Once they come to know about you and your services, they will have the interest to know more about you.
• The Key idea is to keep your content length appropriate. Not to bore your visitors but to provide them with important information.
• Supplement it with images, infographics, and other media: Reading newspaper is an old fashion nowadays. People search the news of their interest on the Internet or rather watch it on YouTube, or other such sites. Here, the key idea is to make your content very eye-catching. Readers would get attracted by the images, and in turn, they will go through your content to know more. In case, your site has videos to explain your services, then relax you are surely going to draw in traffic.
• Usage of proper grammar: Grammar plays the most important part of content writing. Grammar provides the meaning to the text. Improper grammar can portray a different meaning. So, you must be careful and place proper grammar in your content.
• Proper page and text formatting: In SEO copywriting, the text format is most important. Proper headlines must be used and in turn, highlighted. Headlines attract people’s attraction, then they prompt them to click and go deep inside the pages. When you rank in Google’s top 10, and the headline of your content is attractive and eye-catching. It does not matter whether your rank is 1 or 4. This is because you still attract organic visitors to your site.
• Appropriate use of meta tags: Meta tags helps search engines and searchers understand the topic you are writing about. They can also get knowledge about why your keywords and phrases keep appearing in the content. Meta Description must be under 150 characters including spaces. Just like your content, the meta description must be unique. Duplicate meta descriptions are overlooked by webmasters.
• Original Content no duplicity: You must write original content. If your content is found plagiarized or duplicate, then your website will be penalized for the long term. Make sure that you check your contents on CopyScpae or other plagrism checking sites to detect the originality. 

In case you are creating content as a part of marketing strategy. You have to always think of pleasing the readers and the search engine. Blogs, landing pages may not boost your search engine ranking instantly. But in the long run, it will give a positive effect on your Search Engine Optimization. Organic SEO is what is known as White Hat SEO. Original texts have lower bounce rates and higher chances to receive the attention of social media. Eye-catching texts help you in getting higher conversions on your website.

Content is no doubt the king on the Internet. People would watch videos, look at images but at last, they have to read texts to get better knowledge. As there is no other option to understand things better than reading. Proper usage of content can make your websites gain a high rank in the search engine pages.

Reasons you should invest in content marketing

1. Google loves fresh content: Google loves fresh and informative content. Therefore, by publishing regular content on your website you can attract traffic actively searching for information.
2. Content drives in more sales: Strong call to actions in your blogs and landing pages can attract traffic and motivate them in taking a decision. From being a visitor to your website they can turn into customers.
3. Helps to control the conversation: Content marketing can plain the benefits of your services or products. Moreover, through properly explained contents you can get into a  conversation with visitors. They can put their views through feedback or comments.
4. Amplifies brand awareness: Content explaining positive aspects of your services and products can help them rely on your brand. Through content marketing, you can boost your brand by adding value and establishing the voice of the industry. When you are thinking of content marketing with the intent of brand awareness focus on parameters on adding value, and not only for selling stuff. Contents are meant to reveal the individuality of your company.
5. Enhances SEO efforts: An optimized content can help in increasing the ranking of your website. Good links can increase the page authority of your website. Search Engines prefer websites with healthy links and fresh content. Therefore, making indexing of the contents easier. And we all know that fresh contents get the first preference in Google and organically gets ranked on the 1st page.

How To Decide On Your Primary Content Type?

• Choose the ideal content format according to your niche: Figure out the format that will work best for the topics you write. For example: if you are running a business that sells skincare products, blogs and videos are the best way to attract audiences. On the other hand, having a business related to food, written content, or sharing recipes can hugely benefit your business. The best way to search the best type of content for your business is by researching your business competitors and checking out the type of contents they are publishing. That does not mean you should work on your unique ideas. Use all the ideas for the best business results.
• Use a  format that the audience likes: When we have to check out a  video we trust Youtube, on the other hand for text-based information we rely on LinkedIn and Facebook. Nowadays, videos are the best type of social media content for all types of social channels. Therefore, you can create a  video of 10 seconds to 20 seconds long and post it on your Facebook, Instagram,  LinkedIn, and more. Informative videos are surely loved by all the audience.
• Prioritize your strengths: In case you are good at writing, you can create blogs with a lot of information mostly catering to the requirements of the customers. If you have content writers who have experience in this field, make them create rich informative content. Or you can create blogs along with videos, and use them on your blog page along with uploading them in the social media channels. Videos can be the strength of your brand as they pull out the content well. You can publish the content on your website, blog page, content resources, or share it on 3^rd party guest posting sites or places like a medium. The bottom line is you must post the contents at places where you have your target audience. If you want to get traffic from Google you must create and publish high-quality, unique content for sure.
• Publish Content on regular basis for best results: According to the survey, it has been noted that bloggers or brands those who publish content regularly. But if you have high-quality content you can turn it into pieces and post it on different platforms. This is known as Content Repurposing. This step not only guides you to add value to your content marketing efforts but is also an easy way to stay active.
• Quantity of the content: There is a debate on the quantity of content that should be posted on Google. According to WordPress, the minimum words that should be published is 350 words. But we all know for an informative article or a  blog 350 words is not enough. There are other research conducted by top bloggers and blogging platforms, and it has been seen that posts are rank on the 1^st page of google consists of above 2000 words to 5700 words. Long posts are known as skyscraper contents and are generally filled with a  lot of information.
• Quality of the contents: To become a  brand you must always aim to solve the problems of the customers, therefore, try to create content based on the pain points and the questions that are generally asked by the audience. Content marketing is not about filling up the page with words that do not make sense. Rather contents must always be helpful for the consumers or traffic visiting the website.
• Create content with top-ranked keywords and headings: When you are constructing a blog aim for the best keywords based on your products or services. Keywords make it easier for Google to understand the subject of your content and get it indexed faster. Also, opt for LSI  keywords, longtail keywords, and phrases related to your post. Targeting keywords does not mean that you have to stick to your title. You can use the H1 tag, H2 tag, and grab other topics related to your main keyword.

Conclusion

In a  survey conducted by Hubspot, it has been shown that companies spend 46% of their budget on content creation. In 2020 Hubspot conducted another survey where nearly 40% of marketers say content marketing is a very important part of their overall marketing strategy.

In case you want to grow your business online, you must invest in content marketing and create informative content, answer questions frequently searched by the audience, and also try to answer their pain points.

Cogito Software Solutions has an experienced Content Marketing Team that can guide you with the best content strategy. Not only that, we can help you to articulate strategized contents that go on telling cohesive stories about your brand and help you to increase your business ROI.

Therefore, get a  solid content marketing strategy designed by our best content writers. Contact us to know more about us.

Editor’s Note:

This blog has been created by the Cogito Softwares Content Marketing Team, in association with the Digital Marketing, and Graphic Design Team. The A Step By Step Guide To Content Marketing is created for the purpose to guide writers whether they are bloggers, web content writers, technical writers who find the correct resources to ease their writing. Moreover, we have also researched and spoken about other useful and tending content writing tips essential for a  content writer. We have taken help from top marketing journals and the best resources found in Google to construct this informative piece. Hope you find it useful in your daily working life. Thank you for reading this blog.