Content Marketing Training

What is Content Marketing : Content marketing is the creation, publishing and sharing of content with the aim of building brand reputation, awareness and affinity.

Content marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to use in bringing consumers along the conversion funnel. Different formats, types and styles for your content will serve different audience needs and ultimately improve your chances to acquire new customers or clients.

There are a variety of benefits when it comes to content marketing. Matching these benefits to your business objectives will help you form a content marketing plan that’s right for your business.

Grow: your brand or business awareness
Recruit: brand advocates and new customers
Increase: SEO ranking and web traffic
Generate: leads and new business
Enhance: understanding of business and interaction with key audiences

When you’re creating content to support your digital marketing strategy, you should always remember that the purpose of that content is to establish a relationship with your buyer and build trust. You can do this by creating content that provides customers with genuine value and educates them in a way that highlights your product or service’s Unique Selling Point. The more informed your customer is, the more encouraged and prepared they will feel to buy from you.

In order to be truly effective, your content needs to be:
Relevant: if you can’t see how a piece of content would resonate with your customer, don’t create it.
Personalized: customize content to best engage your customer and demonstrate that your brand values the personal touch!
Educational: teach your customer something they need to know, or better yet, something they didn’t realize they needed to know.
Addresses the buyer’s needs or interests: ensure your content is meeting your customers needs, perceived needs or interest. Why should they take the time to watch or read it?
Includes explicit calls-to-action: make sure your content converts by clearly stating what follow up actions you want your customer to take.
Demonstrates how you can provide a solution to their needs: how can you help? How will your product, service or brand help solve the problems that your potential customer may be experiencing?

What is Content Marketing Strategy ?

A content strategy is an ever-evolving plan that determines your content marketing goals, target and objectives. It takes into account your audience, their buying journey and the formats and style aligned with your wider business.

A content marketing strategy is an ever-evolving plan that determines your content marketing goals, target audience and their content needs, defines their user journey, content formats, content styling, and is aligned to business objectives fully integrated with the wider business.

It’s important for content marketers to be working to a strategy to define what content is created, what purpose it’s serving to your wider business goals and how effective it is in helping achieve those.

CONCEPT

Matching the benefits of content marketing to your business objectives will help you form a content marketing plan that’s right for your business.
There are two main types of content; topical and evergreen. A good content mix should factor in both types of content.
Always make sure your content has a clear intention on what you are aiming for it to achieve. Intention-less content will easily be spotted by customers!
Community management is essentially the customer service aspect that can arise from the content you seed. It’s an important consideration in resourcing in your overall content marketing plan.
A content marketing strategy is a cyclic process made up of 6 key steps; research,

RESEARCH

Social listening will help you identify opportunities for your business, spot potential risks or threats to your brand and understand brand and business position on different platforms.
Carrying out regular competitor analysis will help you to define what content works well for your intended audience and avoid the embarrassment of similar messaging.
Use tools like Tweetdeck, TweetReach and Buzzsumo to carry out competitor research and identify popular topics and content formats.
When conducting a content audit, be sure to put narrative around your findings and don’t just report on stats.
Your monthly content audit should include: key metrics, most successful content, least successful content, learnings and detail what else is happening in your wider business.

PLAN

Making sure content is aligned to your overall business goals will ultimately help drive your commercial message.
When developing customer personas, remember to carefully research each of the following: geography, demographic, platforms, devices and purchase behaviors.
Brainstorming, Social Listening and Community Engagement are great ways to generate content topics as well as tools like Pinterest, Flipboard, StumbleUpon and RSS Feeds.
Content calendars are an essential tool to avoid missing important dates, focusing on your message and over spamming one channel over another. But remember to align your calendar with business activities!
A well chosen CMS takes care of a lot of the “behind the scenes” work and can help guarantee a positive customer experience as they consume your content. Popular offerings include: WordPress, Drupal, and Percolate.

CREATE AND CURATE

Be sure to research your audience, define your proposition and strategy and allocate adequate resources before jumping into content creation.
Be aware of the various advantages and limitations of using a variety of content types and formats.
Content curation is a great way to appear less promotional and generate goodwill. Make sure to add your own insights to it and check sources to make sure they are reliable and factually correct!
Your company’s brand personality is made up of how you speak to customers, your tone of voice and the image and style linked to your brand. It can be put into three overall categories; functional, emotional and essential.
Content personalization maximizes the return on your creation efforts, as it’s tailored to potential and existing customers at their specific stage of the customer journey.

PUBLISH

Remember to consider the content need, the audience ecosystem, your proposition and format when deciding on which platform to use for your content.
There are many platforms to choose from including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and your website. Each platform supports each type of content differently.
Content seeding allows your content to reach a much wider audience, drives more traffic to your site and ultimately generates more leads and conversions.
There are 2 main methods for content scheduling: native and third party.
Content promotion is a great way to get your content seen by a wider audience and can be done through a number of methods; influencers, guest blogging, tagging, affiliate and marketing, media partnerships.
Repurpose content to reach new audiences and extend the life span of your content.

MEASURE

Content marketing is valuable for three main reasons. It increases brand awareness, builds brand conviction and ultimately drives sales.

There are three components to calculating ROI of your content:
Investment in content
Performance of the content
Long tail benefits

Key metrics to measure in your content marketing strategy include reach, engagement, sentiment, clicks and conversions.
Make sure to review your content in light of these metrics in order to make changes to your strategy going forward.
Tools like SproutSocial, Buffer, Google link builder and Analytics and TweetReach will help you track the key metrics for your business.