Content marketing involves content production and content distribution be it in digital form or physical form. Content that is used on digital channels like blogs, social media, emails, audios, videos, images are an example of digital content.
While content that used on billboards, newspapers, etc are an example of physical form.
By reading these example you might have gotten some ideas about content marketing.
Yup, you guessed it right.
They are used for marketing and advertising purpose, be it for brand awareness, sales, customer retention or even getting new leads or potential customers. A powerful content marketing campaign requires marketers to create high quality and original content which people can’t get over with.
Content that leaves people jaw-dropping and wondering about the content. Content marketers should also distribute the content through the best mix of channels and here we will talk about only digital channels since we are blogger sand content marketers also.
However, the most common mistake content marketers make is they just jump right away into content production and distribution without proper knowledge of content marketing.
So here we are going discuss all the major and important steps of content marketing which every blogger or content marketers should think of.
1. Setting the goal
Before moonlighting your way on a content marketing journey, you should define your goals clearly. Without proper goals, you may get lost when you dive deep into content creation and distribution.
Your goals should be aligned with your overall business foundations and translated into key metrics, against which the content marketing will be executed. Content marketing goals can be classified into various different categories.
Some of which are sales-related goals, brand-related goals etc…
Sales related goals include lead generation, sales closing, up-sell, down-sell, order bumps and sales referral. Brand related goals include brand awareness, brand association, and brand loyalty or advocacy. So before you do anything set up your goals of content marketing first. Goals make everything easier and much more compelling to look after.
2. Define your audience
Once the goals have been clearly defined, you should determine what kind of audiences you want to target. You cannot simply define the audiences in broad terms such as “badass,” “9-5 crushers,” or “action takers.” It should be something like a bio-data of a person. Gender, age range, monthly income, relationship status, spending habits, their pains, their desires, where do they hangout etc…
Defining your audience like example will help you create sharper, deeper and over all effective content, which in turn contributes to the brand’s effectiveness of storytelling.
After you have done your due diligence meaning defined your audience, you need to profile the audiences and describe their personas, which will help you imagine what the audience actually looks like in real life.
Through proper research, you also need to discover their burning pains, anxieties, desires, and aspirations. Which will not only help you understand your audience better but also helps you understand their need for specific content. You should then aim to provide content that helps them to relieve their pains, anxieties and achieve their desires and aspirations.
3. Content Planning
The next step is to find ideas about what content to create and present before your ideal customer avatar. Combination of relevant stories, suitable formats, and solid conversation results a successful content marketing campaign. In finding the right stories, you should consider two things. First, great content has clear relevance to customer’s lives.
Content must mean something to the audience so that they can’t resist it and stick to it. It must solve their burning pains, anxieties and help them pursue their desires. An effective content has stories that reflect the brand’s characters and codes. This means that content must become the pipe that connects the brand’s stories to potential customer’s burning pains and desires. So figure out all these and plan an effective content which are relevant to your ideas customer avatars.
4. Creating Content
All the things that we have discussed by far leads us to the most important step, which is creating content itself. A huge disclaimer to make, creating content requires enormous commitment in terms of time and budget. If you are doing it just for the sake of something then I’m sorry to say your journey would get a lot difficult.
If you want to learn how to write viral content that people love and share click here to read this in-depth article where we shared in sider’s stuffs which you can’t get anywhere not even after paying it. You should know that content creation is not a parttime job that can be done half-heartedly. In fact, content creation is a whole business in itself.
It demands marketers to act like publishers with strong will of writing, editing and publishing.
Which leads us to the next step, PUBLISHING.
5. Distributing content
Original and high-quality content is useless unless it reaches its intended audience.
Among millions of content, it is fairly easy for a particular content to get lost in transmission. You need to ensure that your content can be found by your ideal audience through proper distribution of content.
And one of the best things you can do to distribute your content to your targeted customer avatar is by finding out where do they hang out which is step 2 in this article.
Once you know where they hangout, you can easily put all your high-quality content there according to the goals you have from those content.
For example, if they hangout on Instagram, get there as fast as you can. And not just on Instagram we want you to spread your content through all the social media platforms.
Be it a Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Linkedin, YouTube, TikTok you name it. Its digital world, chances are your customers spend a lot of their time on these social media.
So be omnipresent.
There you have it.
