What is Content Marketing?

Overview

Let’s break it down. Content is the assets customers will interact with. It can be blogs, videos, infographics, whitepapers, e-books, flyers, and more. The possibilities are endless. Content marketing is the planning, creating, and delivering that content to achieve your goals.

How to plan your Content Marketing Strategy

1. Established goals

This is the obvious first step for any strategy. The common goals of content marketing are generating leads, attracting visitors/potential customers, and engagement. These are starting goals, potential future goals if your content does well and becomes your business or side business such as YouTubers, influencers, selling your e-books etc. It can generate potential revenue.

2. Choose the audience.

Define your audience. You can choose a broad, but the better defined they are, the better your strategy. It will guide the type of content you create. For example, for a younger audience, it will inform the usage of slang terms, brighter colours, what topics they are interested in.

3. Who are you?

What are your company’s values, mission, personality? It should be at the core of the content you make and fit into your brand. It will also help you create content to better explain and show off your company!

4. Conduct Competitor analysis

You can look at the various content your top competitors are creating to see where you may be lacking, where you can create unique content, and take inspiration from.

5.Delivery

Distribution channels for your content are important. Here is a quick list:

• Social Media: There are general demographics on various social media. Also, different platforms favor certain formats better. For example, Youtube favours longer videos. While Instagram and Tiktok favors shorter video. Instagram is generally a visual platform. While Twitter, text works better.
  
• Magazines, Newspapers, Newsletter and Blogs: Although physical print is dying, online has been booming. You can create your own or be a sponsor in another magazine. They often have niche audiences you can tap into.
  
• Websites: Your website will be most visited channel, here you can control everything from the look, feel, of it including the content.
  
• Apps: They have been booming and many companies have launched their own. It is a highly complex channel, so please work with an experience company and see if it fits in your strategy and needs.

Reminder there are places & content you own, earned (backlinks), and paid for. Explore them!

SEO will also be a part of your content strategy. Such as what topics to focus on, keywords to use, and drive traffic to it.

6. Promotion

You will need to promote your content. Various ways to promote are:

• Email, like a regular newsletter
• In-person
• Social media Posts
• Ads

7. KPIs

Before you should establish a baseline, and constantly check on the progress of your content. Typical KPIs are website visits, engagement, and etc.

Content is constant and needs to be generated to keep it fresh and new for your audience. If you don’t know what to create read my post on content various ideas for business.