Content marketing is a strategy that companies use to present their products and services in an engaging way on the internet.
If done right, content marketing will deliver new customers to your business while providing valuable customer insight for future strategies and campaigns.
If you’re a beginner, this blog post will help you on how to start content marketing.
Why You Should Do Content Marketing
As an entrepreneur, we all know how important it is to draw a roadmap for our growth and create concrete goals that need to be achieved every day.
Content Marketing is an investment, not just a cost of doing business. It’s how you build relationships with your audience so they become interested in the brand and eventually buy from it.
Content marketing can take many forms including blogs, videos, social media posts, or e-books – essentially anything that reaches people beyond the company homepage.
Successful content marketers know that there are three keys to success:
1. Identify what your audience wants and needs.
2. Provide them with quality information.
3. Measure results against goals which should lead to an increased ROI (Return on Investment).
How to Start Content Marketing?
Now that we’re clear on what content marketing is and why you should be doing it, let’s take a look at the eight important steps in starting your own content campaign.
Step 1: Define Your Objective
You need to understand what benefits you want to achieve when creating your content. Are you trying to drive more traffic to your website? Or are you looking to increase sales leads by a certain percentage? What is your goal?
Step 2: Define Your Persona
So who will be reading or watching this information that you’re hoping to produce through your content marketing efforts? More importantly, what kinds of questions do they have? What kind of problems are they facing that you can solve through content marketing?
If you don’t know who your audience is, how will you write for them?
Step 3: Define the Message
What information do you want to share in your content? Keep it simple and short. The idea here is to let people know what your business is about and what you can do for them, so they are then motivated to learn more.
Don’t just blurt out a list of features and services with no clear takeaway message. You should have an introduction that explains the problem or challenge at hand and a conclusion that includes how your product can help solve it.
Step 4: Define the Format
What medium will you be using to create your content? If it is a video, decide on the best way of presenting this information. Focus here on how clearly it can be conveyed and whether you have anything that will make people want to watch or read more.
Your audience should finish viewing or reading your content with something they did not previously know or understand.
Step 5: Define Your Distribution Channels
This is the hardest part of starting content marketing, but it’s also the primary reason for doing it since most people will find out about your product through these channels. Each channel is different and requires a different strategy which should be weighed on its effectiveness in generating a return on investment.
Make a list of all available channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and more. Then choose the best one for you to start with.
Step 6: Develop Your Content
Create good quality materials so that people will want to read or watch to get the most out of them. You should take note here that people are looking for useful, interesting, and engaging resources. Your content must be easily available to them.
If they can’t find it, or the links are broken, you could be losing potential customers which means you’ve wasted a lot of time and effort.
Step 7: Measure Results
Review what has been done so far in terms of growing your brand and generating more leads. The success of your content marketing campaign should be measured based on the goals you’ve set. If you’re not seeing an increase in those numbers, you must adjust your strategy accordingly.
Once started, content marketing can become a huge part of the online presence of your business. It offers multiple benefits including potential SEO ranking boost, increased engagement, and awareness of consumers about your brand, as well as a better online image in general.
While it will cost you more upfront to develop quality content for your website or blog, this strategy will build an audience that is now interested in what you offer. As a result, they are more likely to buy from you and recommend your brand to others.
Step 8: Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Campaign
Measuring the success of your content marketing campaign is the most important step since you wouldn’t want to keep doing it if it’s not working. Here are some guidelines on how to measure your results:
- Number of visitors, leads, or sales = Success – You can track this by using Google Analytics and other metrics tools available.
- Number of shares, links, or mentions = Success – You can use social media monitoring tools to get a report of how many times your content has been shared among different platforms and websites.
- Number of comments on your blog post = Success – This shows you have provided valuable information that people are now discussing.
- Number of likes/follows/connections = Success – This proves that people are getting to know you better and want more from you in the future.
Once these steps have been completed, it’s now possible to start developing content and choose the best distribution channels based on your needs and goals.
Conclusion
The most important step in measuring the success of your content marketing campaign is to define what you want it to achieve.
Once you know that, then you can measure how well it’s working by using a variety of analytical tools and metrics.
For any business looking for more leads or sales online, starting with an effective content marketing strategy today will be worth your time and effort.