Successful Content Marketing
According to a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, 62 percent of the most successful content marketers have a documented strategy that they regularly use for successful content marketing. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that there is a certain formula for a successful content marketing.
A successful content marketing strategy must have answer to the “Five Ws and How “. Who, What, Where, When, Why and How are questions that every customer looks for in a content you provide. It is essential to have these questions and relevant answers. For instance, an article on rear wheel drive car can make you curious to know the answer of “What” you can benefit if you consider to buy a rear wheel drive car. Designing your content accordingly can boost your marketing.
Basically, you can prepare the road-map of a successful content marketing strategy by working in four parts: the objectives, the goals, the audience, and the mission.
Objective of the Content Marketing
For your content marketing strategy to make sense, you must first answer a fundamental question: why are you doing content marketing and what do you want to achieve with it? The objectives and methods of content marketing completely determine the action plan to follow, since not all types and formats of content serve the same purposes. Therefore, having things clear from the beginning prevents us from investing time and resources in content that is not required.
To achieve the objective, it is recommended to identify the weak point of your company’s marketing in general. For instance, you can review and answer the following questions:
- Brand awareness: Is it difficult for you to penetrate a new market, launch products successfully or compete with the market leader? If the answer is yes, maybe what you need is to make your brand known to potential customers.
- Involvement of the audience: This can be a good focus if you want to improve the reputation of your brand as a reliable source of information or attract influencers to become ambassadors of your brand.
- Web traffic: Evaluate if your social ad and search campaigns are working, If visitors stay long enough on your website or if they are visiting the most critical pages for conversion.
- Generation and nurturing of leads: Does your sales team have problems finding or qualifying new potential customers? Do you think there is a bottleneck in your conversion funnel?
- Customer retention and loyalty: If you have many customer service calls or you have a hard time building loyalty, this may be one of your weak points.
Goals of the Content Marketing
Once you are clear about what you want to work on, you can use it as a basis to define your content marketing goals. In general, you can group them into one of these three categories:
- Sales: It is a type of content, which supports specific campaigns or products in order to increase conversions.
- Cost savings: This content is designed to improve the efficiency of your marketing in general. For instance, it can help reducing calls to the customer service team.
- Business development: It is the type of content that encourages the creation of new sources of income or product lines.
When specifying what you want to achieve, the experts recommend focusing on creating subscriber audiences, since users who belong to them are more likely to show the desired behavior such as cross purchases, brand loyalty etc.
Audience of Content Marketing
Once you know what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy, the next step is to see who you want to target? Think about the type of user you can most help with your content. These questions will help you discover it:
- Is there a user group relevant to your brand that is not getting the information it needs from other sources?
- What kind of consumers do you have the most difficulty getting to? Do you think your content strategy could help you reach them?
- Do you think you could become the source of reference information for a specific group of users?
Once you have identified your main audience, you will have to define it more precisely, so that your entire team is clear about the target audience. Showcase your USPs with your content so that it exceeds the expectations of customer. For instance, someone looking for a car insurance can get attracted to service if the page content depicts the benefits, customer reviews and reasons to buy.
Mission of the Content Marketing
Once you know what your goals and your audience are, the final step is to define the overall mission of your content marketing. The mission is a brief statement of the unique vision of your brand’s content marketing: the value it offers to users, the audience it targets, its principles and its priorities.
Normally, your mission should focus on being the leading provider of information in terms of a specific niche and for a specific audience. If you think that you are not qualified to be the source of some of the best information in a certain niche, then it is recommended to evaluate your content marketing strategy until you think that your content is good enough to create have the maximum impact.
The mission of your content marketing strategy should be able to help your entire company understand what are the key points that differentiate your content from all others competing for the attention of your audience. Defining a mission helps your team make informed decisions about content creation, as they can use it as a basis to decide which ideas and formats are best aligned with your final objectives.
Once you have built a clear roadmap for the content marketing, it will definitely help you target the right audience without wasting funds. As a result, a clearly developed content marketing plan will help increase return on investment. Therefore, pick up a pen and start creating a workable strategy if you haven’t done so.
Author Helen Cartwright ( helen@helencartwright.com )