What is Content Marketing? 7 factors for a perfect strategy

Your business needs to provide its leads, audience members, and customers with valuable content.

This content should get to the target naturally and organically. With content marketing, businesses are able to do just that.

What is Content Marketing?

In a nutshell, content marketing is the process through which businesses design, generate, dispense, share and publish content so that it gets to a target audience naturally. Through content marketing, factors such as reach, brand awareness, interactions, sales, and loyalty are boosted.

Whether you are getting started with your strategy or are looking for ways to freshen up your current one, re-assessing your entire process and coming up with fresh content to distribute to your audiences won’t hurt your business.

What is a content marketing strategy?

With a sound strategy, your efforts in content marketing will lead to a positive impact and shall be effective in turning your leads into loyal customers.

Here is a summarized view of content marketing strategy:

1. Setting SMART goals

Your goals should align with the needs of your business. Your business should then focus on goals such as boosting revenue, increasing conversions, improving brand awareness and building strong relationships with customers.

2. Determining key performance indicators (KPIs)

KPIs are tangible figures that can be used to evaluate the performance of your SMART goals.

Brand awareness can be evaluated by indicators such as site traffic, subscriptions, number of mentions and followers on social media. Revenue can be measured by site traffic and daily sales figures. Conversion rates can alert you on the percentage of prospective clients that proceeded to buy your product or service.

3. Determine the nature of content to include

The type of content you will create and distribute should be specific to your target audience. Think about what they need and the kind of challenges that they need to overcome. Your content should resonate with what they are looking for.

4. Select relevant channels to post your content

After deciding on the type of content to market, you need to choose the channel to distribute it. Think about the ease of sharing your content while deciding on the channel. If you are making content for Facebook, the channel will be the Facebook platform.

5. Budgeting

You will have to spend money to distribute your content in as many platforms as possible. With a proper budget, you will be able to pay for ads, special tools and fees to hire designers and content marketers if need be.

6. Generating and distributing content

If the steps above are conducted efficiently, your content will get to your target audience and possibly convert them into your customers.

You need to be consistent with your content. The best way to track your marketing efforts is using a social media calendar.

7. Use analytics to measure success

With the help of software such as Google Analytics, you can track how well you met your SMART goals by looking at your key performance indicators.

Example of content marketing

Paid ad content marketing

Revolve, an apparel brand utilizes sponsored social media ads to get to the target market as they scroll through their feeds. The ads tell potential customers the sort of products available for sale, with enticing benefits such as free shipping to get at least a portion of the viewers to commit to a sale.

What content marketing agencies do?

Content marketing agencies work closely with businesses that want to outsource marketing. They create written resources, graphics, and video content on behalf of their clients. The content is then published on different platforms to help bring leads and increased sales for the clients.

Need some help to wow your business with the right content marketing strategy? contact us today for a free consultation.