Develop a successful content marketing strategy
Without a doubt, over the past few years, the marketing landscape has undergone a fundamental transformation under the influence of content, mobile and social technologies. Content marketing has become an indispensable and powerful tool for marketers to increase Internet traffic, online presence and attract new customers.
However, creating good content is not an easy task for many marketers, and often this very step is a stumbling block on the success of many content marketing programs. Effective content marketing requires a good strategy, excellent planning, optimized distribution and promotion, and constant analysis of the effectiveness of the content.
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To simplify this process and help you maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing program, we have put together a comprehensive outline of how to optimize the entire life cycle of a content marketing campaign to help you stay on the right track to positive ROI. This is the first of the six parts of the cycle that takes you through each stage of the entire life cycle of a successful content marketing program.
So, without further ado, let's move on to strategy.
Let's draw an analogy with the building. Even if you are not a builder, you know that when building a house, first of all, you need to take care of a solid foundation and build walls, and only then apply paint and furniture. Simply put, if you skimp on the first stage, you doom yourself to failure and the inevitable collapse of your entire unstable and unstable building, which simply cannot stand without a solid foundation.
Why is this so important? Conversations are great, but conversations that are irrelevant and in no way correlate with the needs of your customers are useless and ineffective.
That is why you should conduct an annual audit of your content marketing strategy to ensure that your investments are consistent with your goals and objectives.
Although this is a relatively labor-intensive process, the research phase can begin even when you are just launching your content marketing campaign. Here are a few steps that can help you develop the right strategy for your content marketing:
Marketing strategy involves not only creating a large amount of content, but also the ability to make sure that this content is of high quality.
Have you clearly defined the goals and objectives of your content marketing?
Now that we have moved to a more content-oriented thinking, let's consider this situation: over the next three months, identify specific business goals that will be common to the entire company, and not just to your marketing team. Do you want to be mentioned in 20% or more blogs this quarter? Or do you need to increase sales next year by 15%? All actions you take should ultimately contribute to at least one of your goals.
To achieve real results, go beyond the scope of engagement and set goals that are directly related to your business. These goals need to be translated into clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be used to monitor your progress and apply the necessary adjustments as necessary. This will help you make sure that you stay on the path to success.
Before you create your content, you must define the mission that your content should perform. In other words, what is the ultimate goal of your content? Creating content blindly, without the initial idea of ​​why you are doing this, is more like a deep immersion in total darkness: you have absolutely no idea where you are going. Use the goals and objectives that you set out earlier, even at the stage of creating the mission of your content marketing, and develop them into the following setting: the mission and strategy of your content should be aligned with your business goals. This idea should be at the root of your content marketing. The content you create should not conflict with the original goals that you set during the planning stage of your strategy. For a deeper consideration of this issue, you can read an article containing tips on how to write great content for SEO.
“Direction of content” is a concept introduced by Joe Pulitzi, which emphasizes the importance of differentiating your content from the content of competitors. It also underlines the significant advantage of a thorough preliminary design study of your content before it is created. When planning content, consider how it will differ from competitors.
Your industry itself is a great place to start. Here you can get an idea of ​​the most famous authorities, competitors, experts, and other significant topics and personalities within your discussed space. You can read useful tips on what content your target audience wants in this article.
In addition to your industry, however, you should pay attention to your clients: who is better than your clients, is able to help you identify behavioral patterns to achieve the goal? The practice of making personal cards (persona mapping) is an effective way to gain a deeper understanding of those who represent your audience: the problems they face, how they make buying decisions, and where they go for advice and communication. Successful pieces of content are those that are specifically for your audience.
Look for ways to communicate with customers when, where, and how this is possible. Call them. Buy them coffee. Tick ​​with the sales team. Receive support calls. Understanding your client is not as difficult as it seems at first. Rather, the fact is that most marketers either do not want to make an effort to do this, or are not confident enough to interact directly with customers one-on-one.
In the current era of digital technology, when information about almost everything is easily accessible with just a few touches on the smartphone screen, buyers can easily educate themselves even before making a purchase decision and as a result are more independent and informed than ever. Smart marketers must publish content that directly corresponds to each stage of the three phases of a digital shopper travel journey:
According to digital marketing expert Barry Feldman, you should always be able to answer any of your top 30 questions. Make a list of the most frequently asked questions about your industry and prepare an answer for each. If you can’t say anything that would solve the issue or add value, then this is a bad topic for discussion.
Determine which stage of the sales funnel corresponds to each question. For example, questions about software pricing should be classified as funnel bottoms (BoFu), while basic definitions of industry terms will be included at the top of the funnel (FoFu).
According to Lee Odden, you need to "stop creating content and instead start creating answers that are relevant to your customers at every stage." The following table provides an interesting way to visualize your customer by presenting him in the various stages he passes through. Later you can use this to design and plan the content you need to promote:
Organization of significant potential customers: write down the customers you wanted to touch in the columns below. Tip: be realistic and don’t list too much.
Define and classify content: create personalized content that will most effectively move from one stage to the next.
Let's try this example: you have defined your target audience as women between the ages of 30 and 50 who live at home with pets and children, and you use content marketing to promote your brand of household cleaning products. Your potential buyer has not yet heard about your products, so your goal at this stage is to transfer it to the awareness stage. To do this, you should expand and diversify your content. Consider using common concepts, such as “The Most Marked Children's Activities” or “How to Remove Red Wine Stains from a Carpet,” which she may look for in situations where your product may be useful.
Attention: when your visitors enter the Review stage and become potential buyers, it's time to add specifics to your strategy. Although customers already know about your product, their knowledge is minimal at best, and additional information is needed to fully convince them of the value of your product. Right now you are presenting the benefits of your product. For example, "5 things you could do with [a product] that you don't know about."
This is the final stage of the travel buyer, and at the same time the best time to attract your community to create additional content. On the one hand, you already have satisfied customers who may be willing to provide evidence of their experience or exalt the benefits of your product in writing. But at the same time, you must make sure that these people are nearby and remain loyal, so provide them with informative content that contains useful information about new opportunities, offers, or tips, if applicable.
Building a list of all your content ideas in the table above will give you a great start to determining your content, which can now be developed and planned in advance, in the content calendar.
While the results may seem excessive, it is still useful to take into account whether the necessary content will be more useful if it is created from scratch or supervised. Do not forget that third-party content collects from 4x to 7 times more trust than brand-generated content, so keeping some of the content in the table above is an effective way to save time and reduce stress, while strengthening your position.
Although brand recognition is the main goal at the top of the funnel, as your progress progresses towards the base of the funnel, you should move on to lead generation by creating and managing content.
Organize your content framework for conversion: each piece of content in a publication (be it original, curated, or modified content) must be optimized for conversion. Always include GTS in your blog posts to drive traffic to your landing pages and generate more potential customers.
You should regularly conduct in-depth audits as the basis of your daily content creation practice. While this may seem unnecessary at first, you should make auditing a common practice to analyze the effectiveness of your content as it grows. To determine the effectiveness of your content and improve it, you need a holistic method for measuring ROI. This includes careful and regular monitoring of page views, potential customers, sales, etc., generated by each piece of content. You should also track conversion rates for each post, which will help you optimize, update, modify, and recycle content over time. This practice is vital if you want to save time and produce more quality content!
If you want to learn more about how to consider the right KPI to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts, pay attention to this simple content marketing analytics framework!
• Give your audience value: every sentence or paragraph you write must be created to provide value to your audience. Your content should be about them and how exactly you can bring something useful or valuable in the lives of your customers, and not engage in continuous self-promotion and fill them with information about your brand.
• Comply with integrity: no matter how it sounds, in the process of writing it is very easy to get lost and forget about the original purpose of your post. Resist the temptation to overwhelm your readers with information in one post. Think strategically instead and save some of your ideas for later on, to later develop them into several separate good posts for your blog.
However, creating good content is not an easy task for many marketers, and often this very step is a stumbling block on the success of many content marketing programs. Effective content marketing requires a good strategy, excellent planning, optimized distribution and promotion, and constant analysis of the effectiveness of the content.
Content marketing is a continuous cycle that requires optimization at each stage to achieve success. Failure or ignoring even one of the steps compromises the success of your marketing program, even if your content is high quality.
')
To simplify this process and help you maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing program, we have put together a comprehensive outline of how to optimize the entire life cycle of a content marketing campaign to help you stay on the right track to positive ROI. This is the first of the six parts of the cycle that takes you through each stage of the entire life cycle of a successful content marketing program.
So, without further ado, let's move on to strategy.
What does it mean to develop a content marketing strategy?
Let's draw an analogy with the building. Even if you are not a builder, you know that when building a house, first of all, you need to take care of a solid foundation and build walls, and only then apply paint and furniture. Simply put, if you skimp on the first stage, you doom yourself to failure and the inevitable collapse of your entire unstable and unstable building, which simply cannot stand without a solid foundation.
Why is this so important? Conversations are great, but conversations that are irrelevant and in no way correlate with the needs of your customers are useless and ineffective.
That is why you should conduct an annual audit of your content marketing strategy to ensure that your investments are consistent with your goals and objectives.
Although this is a relatively labor-intensive process, the research phase can begin even when you are just launching your content marketing campaign. Here are a few steps that can help you develop the right strategy for your content marketing:
Marketing strategy involves not only creating a large amount of content, but also the ability to make sure that this content is of high quality.
Make sure that the results of your content match your goals.
Have you clearly defined the goals and objectives of your content marketing?
Now that we have moved to a more content-oriented thinking, let's consider this situation: over the next three months, identify specific business goals that will be common to the entire company, and not just to your marketing team. Do you want to be mentioned in 20% or more blogs this quarter? Or do you need to increase sales next year by 15%? All actions you take should ultimately contribute to at least one of your goals.
To achieve real results, go beyond the scope of engagement and set goals that are directly related to your business. These goals need to be translated into clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can be used to monitor your progress and apply the necessary adjustments as necessary. This will help you make sure that you stay on the path to success.
Determine the mission of your content marketing strategy
Before you create your content, you must define the mission that your content should perform. In other words, what is the ultimate goal of your content? Creating content blindly, without the initial idea of ​​why you are doing this, is more like a deep immersion in total darkness: you have absolutely no idea where you are going. Use the goals and objectives that you set out earlier, even at the stage of creating the mission of your content marketing, and develop them into the following setting: the mission and strategy of your content should be aligned with your business goals. This idea should be at the root of your content marketing. The content you create should not conflict with the original goals that you set during the planning stage of your strategy. For a deeper consideration of this issue, you can read an article containing tips on how to write great content for SEO.
Find the direction of your content.
“Direction of content” is a concept introduced by Joe Pulitzi, which emphasizes the importance of differentiating your content from the content of competitors. It also underlines the significant advantage of a thorough preliminary design study of your content before it is created. When planning content, consider how it will differ from competitors.
Know your audience = buyers
Your industry itself is a great place to start. Here you can get an idea of ​​the most famous authorities, competitors, experts, and other significant topics and personalities within your discussed space. You can read useful tips on what content your target audience wants in this article.
In addition to your industry, however, you should pay attention to your clients: who is better than your clients, is able to help you identify behavioral patterns to achieve the goal? The practice of making personal cards (persona mapping) is an effective way to gain a deeper understanding of those who represent your audience: the problems they face, how they make buying decisions, and where they go for advice and communication. Successful pieces of content are those that are specifically for your audience.
Look for ways to communicate with customers when, where, and how this is possible. Call them. Buy them coffee. Tick ​​with the sales team. Receive support calls. Understanding your client is not as difficult as it seems at first. Rather, the fact is that most marketers either do not want to make an effort to do this, or are not confident enough to interact directly with customers one-on-one.
Identify your life cycle stages = funnel stages
In the current era of digital technology, when information about almost everything is easily accessible with just a few touches on the smartphone screen, buyers can easily educate themselves even before making a purchase decision and as a result are more independent and informed than ever. Smart marketers must publish content that directly corresponds to each stage of the three phases of a digital shopper travel journey:
Identify and answer the main questions of your audience at each stage of the funnel.
According to digital marketing expert Barry Feldman, you should always be able to answer any of your top 30 questions. Make a list of the most frequently asked questions about your industry and prepare an answer for each. If you can’t say anything that would solve the issue or add value, then this is a bad topic for discussion.
Determine which stage of the sales funnel corresponds to each question. For example, questions about software pricing should be classified as funnel bottoms (BoFu), while basic definitions of industry terms will be included at the top of the funnel (FoFu).
Make a map of the path of the buyer
According to Lee Odden, you need to "stop creating content and instead start creating answers that are relevant to your customers at every stage." The following table provides an interesting way to visualize your customer by presenting him in the various stages he passes through. Later you can use this to design and plan the content you need to promote:
Organization of significant potential customers: write down the customers you wanted to touch in the columns below. Tip: be realistic and don’t list too much.
Define and classify content: create personalized content that will most effectively move from one stage to the next.
Awareness:
Let's try this example: you have defined your target audience as women between the ages of 30 and 50 who live at home with pets and children, and you use content marketing to promote your brand of household cleaning products. Your potential buyer has not yet heard about your products, so your goal at this stage is to transfer it to the awareness stage. To do this, you should expand and diversify your content. Consider using common concepts, such as “The Most Marked Children's Activities” or “How to Remove Red Wine Stains from a Carpet,” which she may look for in situations where your product may be useful.
Attention: when your visitors enter the Review stage and become potential buyers, it's time to add specifics to your strategy. Although customers already know about your product, their knowledge is minimal at best, and additional information is needed to fully convince them of the value of your product. Right now you are presenting the benefits of your product. For example, "5 things you could do with [a product] that you don't know about."
Decision:
This is the final stage of the travel buyer, and at the same time the best time to attract your community to create additional content. On the one hand, you already have satisfied customers who may be willing to provide evidence of their experience or exalt the benefits of your product in writing. But at the same time, you must make sure that these people are nearby and remain loyal, so provide them with informative content that contains useful information about new opportunities, offers, or tips, if applicable.
Building a list of all your content ideas in the table above will give you a great start to determining your content, which can now be developed and planned in advance, in the content calendar.
While the results may seem excessive, it is still useful to take into account whether the necessary content will be more useful if it is created from scratch or supervised. Do not forget that third-party content collects from 4x to 7 times more trust than brand-generated content, so keeping some of the content in the table above is an effective way to save time and reduce stress, while strengthening your position.
Although brand recognition is the main goal at the top of the funnel, as your progress progresses towards the base of the funnel, you should move on to lead generation by creating and managing content.
Optimize your content for conversion
Organize your content framework for conversion: each piece of content in a publication (be it original, curated, or modified content) must be optimized for conversion. Always include GTS in your blog posts to drive traffic to your landing pages and generate more potential customers.
Always audit
You should regularly conduct in-depth audits as the basis of your daily content creation practice. While this may seem unnecessary at first, you should make auditing a common practice to analyze the effectiveness of your content as it grows. To determine the effectiveness of your content and improve it, you need a holistic method for measuring ROI. This includes careful and regular monitoring of page views, potential customers, sales, etc., generated by each piece of content. You should also track conversion rates for each post, which will help you optimize, update, modify, and recycle content over time. This practice is vital if you want to save time and produce more quality content!
If you want to learn more about how to consider the right KPI to measure the ROI of your content marketing efforts, pay attention to this simple content marketing analytics framework!
Useful tips to help you keep your finger on the pulse while writing:
• Give your audience value: every sentence or paragraph you write must be created to provide value to your audience. Your content should be about them and how exactly you can bring something useful or valuable in the lives of your customers, and not engage in continuous self-promotion and fill them with information about your brand.
• Comply with integrity: no matter how it sounds, in the process of writing it is very easy to get lost and forget about the original purpose of your post. Resist the temptation to overwhelm your readers with information in one post. Think strategically instead and save some of your ideas for later on, to later develop them into several separate good posts for your blog.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/305498/
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