What is content marketing?

Creating content (and content marketing) is the best way to provide value for our audiences. We all heard from Bill Gates, “Content is king!” so, as a business owner, you need to find what kind of content your customers want. 

Content is all over the internet, and we use it everywhere. For every email, social media post, blog, etc., we want to drive valuable online traffic to our funnel and convince our target audience to take the necessary action, whether we are a small local business or a multi-national enterprise. In addition, it helps us build trust and a long-term relationship with them. 

We have to focus on content marketing to:

• enhance brand awareness
• keep loyal customers
• boost search engine ranking
• increase conversion rate
• improve your business value proposition

So, content marketing is all about value creation for our customers before providing a page for search engines because if people love you, then you can ensure search engines will see it. That is why you need to know more and more about your readers and their needs.

Content marketing & buyer’s journey

If you want to know what the audience needs, you should figure out they belong to what stages. For example, are they searching to learn more, looking for a service or product, or are they comparing different features?

Now it is the time to categorize the audiences based on their interests. There are many kinds of modelling out there, but we want to define five different stages that you can put your customer’s needs on them:

1. Awareness

1. • These customers are looking for information and gathering data about products or
     services. The best piece of content is letting them know why you exist and your unique company values compared with your competitors.
2. Interest

1. • People are aware of the service or product, and you need to convince them that paying you has worth it. Talk more about your value proposition and promote the reason you are different.

      3. Consideration

• • Bring your testimonials, experiences, the best reviews, etc., in front of potential customers’ eyes and inform them about the novelty you implemented on your commodities. They found possible solutions.

      4. Conversion

• • Well! it is better to know your customers are ready to purchase. So, do something! And direct them to the landing page. Ensure the buying process is working correctly and they can buy with the minimum clicks. Use lead nurturing, add value, and put a landing page call to action (CTA) in your content.

      5. Retention

• • Provide better content with promotions when you decide to encourage them to do business again. To retarget those potential customers who did not buy from you, share the current buyer’s positive experiences. Create content for showcasing and sharing user-generated content (UGC) through your marketing channels.

What elements make your content highly effective?

To create the best content, think about how relevant your content is. You need to know about the niche you are writing for and their needs to create the most relevant content. Make your message more personalized. Consider the time that your audiences will see your writing. What kind of problem are you solving for the potential customers? You will see how it will increase trust with your customers. The more value you create with your content, the more conversion. 

After ensuring your content creates value and addresses the buyer’s needs and to help them to complete the process, you need to use Call To Action (CTA). They need to know how to take action after hearing, watching, or reading your content. Therefore, you should provide a clear CTA and direct them to your created funnel.

This kind of content will help boost your brand reputation and absorb people’s trust that you are reliable. If they trust you, they will do more business, and you will realize creating highly effective content is investing.

Contents categories

Generally, there are two main types of content: Topical and Evergreen. It would be best if you used both when planning for marketing. 

• Topical Content

This kind of content is the news you can find everywhere, and people are talking about it in society. They are newsworthy and will lose their importance by passing the time. You can create a short writing about them, post it on social media, send a tweet, make a video or even publish a photo.

• Evergreen Content

These are the contents that have a longer lifespan, and some of them are timeless. Some articles like ‘how-to,’ beginner’s guides, case studies, frequently asked questions, etc., can cover them.

Content marketing strategy

Now we are informed about the content types, customer journey, and elements of good content. The next step is creating a strategy to reach the goal, which is conversion. 

The first step is finding the best type(s) of content that can answer our targeted audience. Second, determine which customer belongs to which stage and create content format and style. Then think about the business goal and ask yourself if the content marketing strategy fully aligns with the business strategy. If not, change it because you need to boost the business marketing stream. For the following, remember to keep your plan up to date and change it if you need. The reason is market out there is changing every second. Finally, define the borders. What are the objectives and the scope of the project? It always helps you to remain on the right line.

• Match content and business goals

To align the content marketing and business goals, we need to consider four main criteria.

1. Consistency: Ensure the language and KPIs you measure in content marketing match other marketing indicators.
2. Schedules: Set the time with other marketing activities. Your content marketing tasks will support other marketing materials that are running now.
3. Content opportunities: Try to accept the ideas of other departments of your business to use them as new content input.
4. Digital marketing effect: Every piece of content you make will affect other digital marketing activities. You need to check the impact of content marketing on website content, SEO objective, eCommerce KPIs, etc. and ensure that your activities help them better.

Customer persona, content marketing and features

Let’s talk more about your customers and every element that can make their image more precise—the more information about customers, the more tailored content, and the highest CTR. The buyer persona collects data to draw a perfect picture from your buyers or end users. You need to understand the goal of creating a buyer persona to use in the following:

• Define target market

It is essential to know who is your customer and how you should deal with them. With buyer persona, you can create content as they want and focus on the market share. It can help you to deliver your message better, do more detailed market research, manage your ads, change the UI and UX of your website, and implement correct SEO.

• Select your message theme

Every content has one functionality: deliver a message to audiences. A buyer persona helps you to make unbiased decisions about how to deliver the message with a perfect format to maximize acceptance by consumers.

• Communication channels

It is vital to find the channels where your audiences are there. It means you can send your message to more people, and many of them will find the solution to their problems. This will be easier if you have a profile of your buyers or potential customers.

Now, the question would be how to create a buyer persona and what the elements are. Here is a list that can help you to create a profile template for your customers:

1. Objectives: What do they want from your business?
2. Location: Where are they from and located?
3. Demographic: Their gender and ages.
4. Occupation: What are they doing for a living?
5. Channel: How do they gather information? Which channels?
6. Device: Are they using mobile to surf the net? How can it affect your design?
7. Buying behaviour: What will they do before buying? Are they checking several pages before purchasing?
8. Interest: What problem are they trying to solve? How much is the problem essential for them?

• Best Practice for using customer persona in your content marketing

After creating the profile of your target audience, you need to use it to tailor your content marketing strategy for maximizing CTR.

The first step is ordering the personas based on the most accessible audiences you can reach and the customer lifetime value (CLV) or their value for your business.

Second, allocate the budget and resources to create content for your list based on prioritization.

Third, choose the best type of content your audiences like to deal with based on their journey.

Fourth, create highly relevant content to cover the need of those audiences and let them know you are expert enough to solve their issues.

The fifth step is finding different channels your customers inhabit and selecting the best one to deliver your content.

And the last and sixth step is to define and monitor the essential indicators that cover your strategy, and you can realize if you are creating content in the right direction.

How to research to find content opportunities

There are many approaches to finding a clue and creating content, but you can do that more wisely. For example, use social listening and social monitoring. But what are they?

• Social listening is researching what people are talking about brands, products or services, or even a topic. This process’s benefit is finding helpful information about what people think about you, your competitors, and your niche market. In addition, social listening lets you discover what people are talking about and the negative feedback that can be more serious later.

Social monitoring is another method to track what people are talking about online. Moreover, you can select the part more relevant to your business and collect those conversations to define your next step.

• Check competitors content

How can social monitoring help to monitor our competitors’ content? When you are looking for the ideas that your competitors are working on them, consider the following:

1. The time plan they publish contents
2. Check their buyer’s feedback
3. Check the specific page ranking on search engines
4. what external links are they using
5. The SEO they implemented on the page
6. Which social platform do they have?
7. Their influence marketing approach
8. The content format they are using

This list and other items you can add here can help boost your content’s visibility. Also, many tools like TweetDeck, TweetReach, Buzzsumo, Sparktoro, Google Alert, etc., can help you analyze your competitors.