An Introduction to Content Marketing
The penetration of the internet into people's daily lives has upended traditional advertising and marketing techniques. It is not enough to create an advertisement and hope that customers respond.
Today people use the internet to gather information and read reviews of a product or service before making a purchasing decision and marketing methods have had to change take this into account.
Content marketing is a method of reaching customers by providing relevant and valuable information that helps the customer make a purchasing decision, rather than simply being an advertisement.
Its strategy is rooted in the belief that if a business delivers consistent, useful information to buyers they will reward it with their custom and are likely to remain loyal customers.
This content can be in a range of forms including articles, white papers, videos, blog posts and so on.
In a sense, content marketing is something that all businesses already do on the internet: their website needs to provide information about the products and services that they provide and how they benefit the customer.
However an effective content marketing strategy needs to go further by identifying the things that customers are focusing on.
For example, a problem are they seeking to solve or detailed information about a product they require for comparison purposes; and provide targeted content that addresses their needs.
Getting Started with Content Marketing
The first step in getting started with content marketing is to clearly identify the goals of the marketing effort. A given piece of content should be created to support a specific goal such as:
• Raising awareness of a brand
• Generating leads
• Building an email list
• Helping a customer to reach a purchasing decision
• Retaining customers and making additional sales to them
• Encouraging customer referrals
This goal needs to be coupled with a businesses mission statement - simply put, its reason for existing and the priorities and values it holds. This is encompassed in identifying the following three elements for any marketing endeavour:
• The Target Audience - the ideal person that this content is aimed at and will help the most.
• Deliverables - the type of information that will be delivered by the content and the form in which it will be provided.
• Desired Outcome - what the target audience will be able to do once they have read or otherwise consumed the content.
The target audience should never be 'everyone' since this undercuts the point of this marketing strategy.
The information contained in the content should target a specific customer with a specific goal in mind and help them to achieve that goal.
This makes it possible to ask them to take a specific, desired action once they have consumed the content.
Creating the Content
Content can come in a myriad of forms, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. Essentially the content needs to meet the goals established in the content marketing strategy and be consistent.
Content format will depend on what works best for the topic being communicated, but it should always be focused on the ways customers consume information, what they care about and the marketing goal for creating it.
There are certain types of content that always resonate with people and are a good starting point for content creation ideas. Following are some examples of content that an audience will always respond to:
• Tells a story, particularly how a person overcame a problem
• Reveals secrets or unusual tips and techniques • Gives a fresh point of view, even on common topics
• Encourages a person to never give up
• Confirms or upends a person's assumptions
• Entertains as well as educates
• Inspires people
It will take some experimentation to work out the content customers respond best to and what topics resonate most strongly with them.
Website analytics are a method for seeing which posts and pages are seeing the most traffic and which drive the most engagement.
Topics that have higher than average page views and on which customers spend more time reading them are good indicators of this.
Those that actually lead to the desired action on the part of the audience are more important still.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Content Marketing
Content marketing is effective when it supports marketing and business goals and it is important to be able to track the results of a content marketing campaign to determine how effective it is.
A measurement program should be undertaken at regular intervals, such as monthly, where metrics are collected.
There should be a process in place for gathering the information and who is responsible for collecting and reporting the data.
Metrics should be used to reflect how well the campaign performed against the following:
• Marketing Goals - this is based on the goals established earlier and could include email signups, increased sales, likes on social media and so on.
• Key Performance Indicators - these are the things that must have occurred for the content marketing strategy to be regarded as effective.
A business must be able to measure the success of a content marketing campaign against key metrics such as brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, sales and customer retention. Otherwise it is impossible to tell if the strategy has been effective.
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