First, What is Content Marketing?
In today’s digital marketing world, information overload can make it difficult to reach your target audience. Adding a content marketing campaign to your marketing strategies can give your organization an edge to stand out from the crowd, build brand loyalty, and attract new customers.
Content marketing is the strategy of providing useful, relevant and regular content to an audience. Unlike sales-forward content associated with traditional marketing campaigns, content marketing campaigns engages consumers by offering them useful resources, new information, a solution to a problem or even entertainment through new content.
While traditional marketing campaigns appeal to those who are already interested in your product, content marketing will attract new customers by informing them of solutions to their needs or issues. By informing rather than trying to sell, content marketing will allow you to build trust with potential clients. Also, the information you provide will expose them to your brand and will lead towards your services or products organically.
For a content campaign to be successful, it must be strategic, organized and executed properly. We’ve outlined eight basic tactics to develop your strategy and help you get started with an effective and efficient content marketing campaign today.
Starting Your Campaign: Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
Sites that use a written content strategy are twice as effective as those without one. But where to start? Take the time to document your goals, ideas, key objectives, and timeline. This will help shape your campaign strategy and let you hit the ground running.
To start building your marketing strategy you will need to:
- Identify your audience
- Define keywords and topics
- Complete a SERP Analysis
- Utilize key publication channels and mediums
- Create a content calendar
- Build your team
- Use different mediums to tie your strategy together
- Analyze
Identifying your audience
Before you start writing content, you need to consider who will be reading it. Your target audience is everyone that could be interested in your product or service. Audience relevance is the most important factor in creating effective content, so take the time to jot down key demographics and any other relevant features about the people who you want to engage in your campaign to help you determine what type of content will be best for your campaign.
Keywords and topics
Since the goal of your content strategy campaign is to gain brand visibility, you will need to choose content topics that will capture the attention of your target audience. An easy way to do this is using keyword research to discover what your audience is searching. Use free tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic to learn what keywords your customers are typing into search engines, and compile a list. Use your keywords to create a master list of content topics that would interest your audience.
Pro Tip: Don’t get bogged down in the details when creating your keyword list. Keep your keywords concise and focused for optimum results.
SERP Analysis
Next, run a SERP analysis on each of your topics. A SERP, or search engine results page, is the page on popular search engines that displays the results. Simply type each topic into your preferred search engine and look through the results.
By performing SERP analysis, you will get an understanding of what your competition is writing about and what the search engines tend to showcase in the results. Use this information to refine your strategy and also see where there are topical gaps. Topical gaps are subjects that people have not written about yet. When you discover these gaps in content, you can take advantage of the opportunity to outshine your competition by filling the need for this missing content.
Publication channels and mediums
Do the research to determine which channels are most popular with the demographics of your target customers.
Publishing content on other media besides your website is crucial to driving new traffic to your site, increasing SEO through backlinks and encouraging social engagement. Consider using third party or guest blogs, podcasts, and the social media channels that are popular with your target audience to draw fresh eyes on your content once you start publishing.
Create a publication calendar
Use a publication calendar to make sure that you stay on top of your campaign. Your calendar should detail how often you are releasing content and publication deadlines for each media.
Publishing quality content on a regular basis helps build authority, a stronger reputation and trust for your brand. Use your publication calendar to help you keep your content consistent for maximum results.
Tie it all together
Once you start releasing content, make sure that you tie multiple mediums together. Share your blog posts on social media. Link to your own pages throughout your website.
By keeping your content cohesive and supportive, you will be able to drive traffic to your website by using resources you already have.
Analyze: Is it working?
Regularly look at your data key data points to see how your campaign is working and stay on top of best practices. Since the way that we engage with the internet and content is always changing, it is always important to look at your metrics on a consistent basis to learn about the tactics that have worked best in your campaigns. Helpful metrics include time spent on your website, search position, share and likes.
Invest in Content Marketing
Investing in content marketing is a great way to increase SEO and web traffic while also building a loyal customer base.
Providing your audience with engaging and useful information will build trust and the reputation of your brand. Developing a written strategy using the eight tactics outlined above will provide a strong backbone for an effective content marketing campaign to take your brand visibility to the next level.
