Content Marketing: Define Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing fits in a broader integrated marketing strategy and it requires a strategy of its own.

Content marketing is much more than about creating, distributing and sharing content in order to engage with the audience, generate leads or improving branding.

For whatever reasons marketing goals you want to serve, you can do it with content marketing.

To begin with, content marketing is taking in any type of content, whether digitally or physically, and purposefully sending it your audience.

By adding a strategy to this, means that you have thought about your goals, audiences and distribution channels.

Common Question on Creating the Best Content Marketing Strategies

The typical question about content marketing strategy plan will answer the below questions:

• Who is your audience? There are usually based on market segments and certain types of content will target specific segments.
• What channels will you use?
• What metrics will you use to measure the success and ROI?
• What resources do you have?
• What pain point you want to solve?

Why Do You Need To Building Content Marketing Strategy?

Yes!  You need to build your own content marketing strategy.

You not only need a proper strategy, but you also need to document it as well.

Those with a documented content marketing strategy:

• Are far more likely to consider more effective at content marketing.
• Feel significantly less challenged with every aspect of content marketing.
• Generally, consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing tactics and social media channels.
• Were able to justify spending a higher percentage of their marketing budget on content marketing.

Content Marketing Strategy Framework

For the basic requirement for successful, scalable content marketing operations can be divided into the five core elements.

Here are the 5 core elements in Content Framework:

1. Your Goals and Purpose

The ‘why’- you need to understand the ‘why’ or purpose in reaching your final goal.

Why you are creating such content and what value you expect it to provide.

2. Your target audience.

The ‘who’ – the one category of consumers your content can benefit most and what is in it for them.

3. Your brand story.

The ‘what’ – what specific, unique and valuable idea you will build your content assets around.

This also includes your overarching content mission, as well as the topical areas you will focus on in pursuit of that mission.

4. Your Process.

The ‘how’ – how will you structure and manage your operations, as well as how you will enable, activate and apply specific content tactics in pursuit of your goals.

5. Your Measurement.

The “how much” – how you will gauge your content’s performance, evaluate its business impacts and identify opportunities for improvement.

Types of Content Marketing Strategies

Definitely, there are a variety of options out there for content you can create.

Here are some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating, tools and templates to get you started.

1. Blog Posts

Whether you are noticing or not, you are currently perusing a blog post.

Blog posts on a website should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors.

Your blog posts should be able to provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share the posts on the social media and across other websites.

The ideal words length for the blog posts would be between 1,000 to 2,000 words.

You could try to experiment to see whether your audience prefers longer or shorter reads, and cater to the major preference.

2. EBooks

EBooks are lead-generation tools which potential customers can download after submitting a lead form about their contact information.

EBook is usually longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract more visitors to the website.

Basically, EBooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process.

For instance, after reading this blog post, you might want more information about it.

This is where calls-to-action (CTA) play its part, by directing the people to a landing page.

Then, you are required to submit the contact information before downloading the EBook to learn more valuable information for the business.

In turn, the business that producing EBook has new leads for the sales team to contact.

It is basically killing two birds with one stone!

3. Social Media

Once you have been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, you might start thinking about distributing your content on other sites.

This could mean repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog.

You can create original specifically for external sites such as Medium, or publishing website content various social networks.

However, posting on social media is pivotal to amplify your brand’s awareness and delivering your content to your customers where you know where they spend their leisure time.

Here are the most popular social networks the businesses often post include:

• Facebook
• YouTube
• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

4. Videos

For your information, videos are one of the most effective and highly engaging mediums that are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike.

However, the possible drawback of videos is required a huge investment of time and resources then written content, as visual marketing increases in popularity.

Nevertheless, the greatest advantages for videos are it is 40 times likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

Many research revealed that video is the most preferred form of content.

This is because the video has the ability to capture people’s attention more than any other content format.

5. Infographics

Infographic could organize and visualise data in a more compelling way than the words alone.

As they said, “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

These are the great content formats to use if you are trying to share countless data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

Others Content Marketing Examples

Here are some content marketing examples from the business for you.

•    Coco-Cola

Coke used personalization to get everybody talking about their brand.

They kicked off their “Share a Coke” campaign in Australia by putting the 150 most common names on bottles.

Fundamentally, they are encouraging people to share a Coke with people with those names.

The campaign went viral which resulting in sales of 250 million bottles and cans.

•    Burberry

One of the Burberry’s most outstanding content marketing campaigns was Burberry Kisses.

It is a campaign that blending technology with the human wish to connect with others.

Via an app, the users now could press their lips to the screen and send a digital kiss to anyone.

The campaign also allowed people to use Google Maps and Google Street View to see the journey those digital kisses took.

With this content marketing examples, hope that you are all set to wow your visitors with new, creative and fresh ideas.

Want to know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is referred to the management of pretty much tangible media that you create and own.

Whether it is in – written, visual or downloadable, you name it.

It is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise that you bring to your industry.

You might have heard how content creation plays a significant role in the growth of the business.

However, as you will see throughout this post, it needs more than this.

It needs to have a well-planned purpose.

What Do Content Marketing Strategies Do?

First of all, let’s outline what content strategist actually does.

So, there won’t any confusion about it.

A content marketing strategist is a person that responsible for planning, developing delivering and finally promoting relevant content based on the user needs and business goals.

However, the exact role of content marketing strategist might vary from company to company.

Some duties of content marketing strategists still remain consistent across every role.

Typically, a content marketing strategist does the following:

• Develops the content strategy.
• Determine what kind of content to use, based on the target audience.
• Promotes the content.
• Set tone, style and voice for the content.
• Developing and improving the brand of the content development process.
• Measures and analyses the key content marketing metrics.

Key Considerations in Developing a Content Marketing Strategy

Before you develop the content strategy, there are several key things to consider:

1. Define your target audience

Who is the target audience for this content?

For how many audiences you are creating the content?

And of course, you might have more than one type of customer.

Thus, your content strategy should be able to cater to more than one type of reader or viewer that suit to their needs.

You could use various types of content and channels to deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.

2. Educational and problem-solving content

Ideally, you should know what are the problems faced by your audience, and help them to solve with your products or services.

By the same token, your content should be educational for the audience to learn about it.

Educate your audience through the content as they will begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy should support the people on both sides of your product.

The content should support the people who are still figuring out what their main challenges.

And for those who already are using your product to overcome these challenges.

Reinforce the solutions that you are offering in the content and makes your audiences more qualified users of your products.

3. What Makes You Special and Unique

Obviously, there are possibilities that your competitors are likely to have similar products as yours.

Thus, you need to differentiate your products about your products with your competitors.

In another word, you potential need customers need to know what makes yours better, or at least, different.

Here you go; this is where the content comes in!

To prove why you are worth buying for, you need to ascertain why you are worth listening to in the first place.

4. Content Formats

What kind of content format you will focus on?

Whether is it an infographic?

Perhaps, it could be videos or blog posts?

As you need to identify the topics that you want to take the position on, you will need to define which formats are best to express that position.

5. Identify Which Channels to Publish

Just as you can create content in different formats, you also need to have different channels that you could publish to.

The channels are including owned properties, such as your website and blog, or maybe social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Why You Need The Best Content Marketing Strategy Framework?

Absolutely, content marketing can help your business to prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.

Let’s take a moment and think about it.

Just imagine that you could create just one blog post that can get a steady amount of organic traffic.

Then, an embedded link to an eBook or free tool will help you to continue generating leads for you as time goes on.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will provide you with the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue.

For example, you could generate revenue through social media advertising, sponsored content and distributed content.

This will help you to educate your target prospects and generate more awareness for your brand.

How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Now, let’s dive in more detail to learn the specifics of how to create a well-planned content marketing strategy.

1. Define Your Goal.

Defining and Understand your original goal is important in setting the roadmap to a successful content marketing strategy.

What is your aim for developing a content marketing plan in future?

Why do you want to develop content and create a content marketing plan?

These are questions that you should be questioning about your content marketing strategy plan.

Know your goals before you begin planning.

And then you will have an easier time in determining what the best for your strategy is.

2. Conduct Persona Research.

To develop a successful content marketing plan, you need to clearly define the target audience of your content.

In another word, know your buyer persona.

This is especially crucial for those who just starting out or still new to the marketing.

By knowing your target audience, you could produce more relevant and more valuable content that they want to read and convert on.

You have to know that your target may have changed.

Do you want to target a brand new group of people or expand your current target market?

Or do you want to keep the same target audience?

Thus, you have to revisit your audience parameters.

You ought to conduct market research each year as it is a vital factor in growing your audience.

3. Run a Content Audit

Almost all the people will start out with the blog posts.

But, if you want to venture out and try creating other content pieces, you need to consider which ones you want to make.

For instance, if you are doing the weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an eBook that distils all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a great way to offer information in a different format.

If you are an experienced marketer, you need to review your content marketing efforts and results from the previous years.

Figuring out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach.

4. Choose a Content Management System.

Have a system in place where you could be managing your content easily.

Some of the few vital parts of content management are including content creation, content publication and content analytics.

The WordPress website hosted on WO Engine will be the example for the content management system that you could use for your business.

 5. Brainstorm the Ideas

Now, it is the time for you to brainstorming some ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the wheels turning.

HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator

You could save your time and energy in thinking on how to generate some attractive topic with HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator.

All you need to do is enter general topics or keywords that you want to write about.

And this content idea generator will do all the work for you.

BuzzSumo

With BuzzSumo, you can discover a ton of popular content and content ideas.

This company offers numerous market research tools, which using social media’s shares to determine whether the piece of content is popular and well-liked.

In addition, this information also can help you to see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content something similar to them.

Want to know more marketing tips? Always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy 

Why does your business need a story?

Everyone loves a great story.

People want to feel connected to a group, to belong.

Stories give you a reason to communicate and relate.

Stories are stimulating and give you something to believe in.

Stories make you feel better, smarter, safer or even loved.

Business storytelling is similar.

It is about creating alignment between your business and prospects and customers.

But telling your brand’s story is more than what you write on your website, your blog, or even social media.

It is your value and your mission, and how you communicate that consistently to your audience – wherever they are.

Thanks to smartphones and tablets, the average adult spends over 20 hours per week with digital media.

Additionally, Google receives over 4 million search queries per minute per 4 minutes.

4 million search queries per minute? Wow!

That is a lot of people looking for the answers.

But, capturing their attention can be difficult.

In just 1 minute…

1388 blog posts are published.

Facebook users share 2.5 million pieces of content.

YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content.

Twitter users tweet nearly 300,000 times.

Instagram users post nearly 220.000 new photos.

All in this can be done in 1 minute.

Content marketers are constantly battling for the attention of their prospects and customers.

To help ensure that you are heard, you need to be genuine and tell a story that appeals to your audience.

Your goal is to make a human connection.

It is about resonating with people, people that you need your help or guidance.

In the world of business, a story helps you create a contrast between choices.

Stories will help your prospects make sense of the decision that they are about to make.

Whatever it is deciding in a needed product or service or making the purchase,

Chances are you are not the only business that does what you do.

Why Stories Matter For Today’s Business?

To survive in today’s crowded informational marketplace, you need to stand out.

This is where your business story comes in.

Stories can make your prospects the main characters, and even change the way they think and feel.

And storytelling is used in all formats of content.

It is not just used in a lengthy eBook.

You can use storytelling in blogs, email, videos, case studies, guides.

The list goes on and on.

So, what is NOT a story?

A story is not just your history.

A story is why you are doing what you are doing, and telling it in a way that appeals to your audience.

It is also not cliché; it is not what everyone else is saying.

Sure you may think you provide the best customer service within your industry, but that is not your story.

Storytelling is about standing out, not blending in.

Many companies play it safe and use data and ROI to attract customers, which is important.

But logic is rarely is appealing and remembered.

On the other hand, emotion gets remembered.

Emotion gets shared.

And it is not by saying we are the best.

It is more about appealing to the emotional side of your prospects and customers than the logic of what you do.

Stories are how audiences remember.

And to help make your audience remember, you need to stand out by telling a story with the right context.

Create a contrast by being consistent and authentic and being conversational to elicit emotion from a specific audience.

As a content marketer, use stories to better engage.

The most importantly, teach your audience.

Content Sharing and Storytelling: Why People do Online Content Marketing?

Content sharing is often – the holy grail of many content marketing, social media and online marketing practitioners in general.

Although content sharing is just a part of the whole content marketing process and social media marketing reality.

All marketers would love to see their content shared as far as wide as possible.

It is a topic that had been living in all forms of marketing.

So, here is the question – why do people share the content?

Why do they tell stories? Why do they bother at all?

The answer is – this is because they want to feel emotionally compelled to.

The Psychology of Sharing: How to Use Content Marketing?

Content sharing – it involves emotions, psychology and quite some chemical process that go hand in hand with the act of sharing.

“The sharing of stories or information may be driven in part by arousal” – Psychologist Jonah Berger.

That seems like pretty self-oriented, don’t you think?

People have tried to define all the emotions and motivations of why content and stories get shared for ages.

Each of the emotion got its own label.

So, there are literally hundreds of ways to look at emotions and motivations.

Similarly, we as humans like to label things and people which are to make sense of the world around us.

Thus, we like to label emotions and connect them with the way on how we act, feel, behave and share.

Content, Social, Content Curation and Storytelling

Without all of the content and stories, the world would be a lot less populated and boring.

Everyone needs to have something to talk about, don’t we?

In the end, that also part of what content marketing is all about.

Storytelling is essential for content marketing.

And one of the characteristics of stories is that they tend to get shared.

Yet, storytelling is about much more than content marketing.

Content marketing is closely related and being integrated with nowadays social media marketing.

It is also depending on the business goals and context that you want to be delivered.

However, it is clear that the combination of content and social is a strong one.

Sharing is not anything new as humans have always shared the content in one way or another.

We just digest the content, share it and discuss it.

It is a fundamental fuel of communities offline and online.

Why You Need Content Marketing?

Besides, you also could use the storytelling to strengthen your brand.

Without a doubt, storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to breathe life into your brand.

It is often being called as one of the main components of a content marketing approach.

Just by giving your products and services an identity by capturing and sharing the stories, you could take your target audience to a journey that they yearn to experience.

In order to establish a personal connection for consumers with your brand, the story should be authentic, creative and inspirational.

Emotional branding is a progressive marketing strategy that has the potential to drive revenue and increase customer retention.

How a person feels about your brand typically determines whether they want to buy your product.

A brand is a matter of perception.

When you try to tell a story that embodies human challenges, you are indirectly creating an experience that resonates with your customers.

To know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Content Marketing Strategy Definition

Of course, content marketing has been a popular buzzword for a few years now.

But, what does it really mean?

The best fit to define about content marketing is it describes the creation of relevant, rich and extremely targeted communications with the commercial purpose.

Now, let’s dive deeper about some of the leading trends in content marketing.

The Power of Content Marketing

Content Marketing is Getting Popular than Ever

Yes, it is quite hot about this thing called content marketing.

It is so much more than a medium used for the communication industry to create some buzzword.

For your information, there is 89 per cent of business-to-business (B2B) companies and nearly as many pitching to consumers.

And, yes. Most of them are using content marketing as a tool to advance their brand presence and engage with their audience.

Of course, sometimes when writing a lot could cause a brain drain for you.

Obviously, when you have a tired brain, you are not as mentally sharp.

Thus, many of the companies or businesses try to overcome it by outsourcing their content marketing to the third party.

So, the question is, if everyone is doing it, will be a room there left for you?

The answer is, yes.

As long as you are putting out the content that your targeted audience will be interested in.

Content is about telling, not selling!

To be specific is it more about storytelling.

You must build a story that the other will want to see, hear or read about it.

You don’t want to scare away your target audience with some meaningless story that they don’t interest in.

In another word, avoid creating the content that meets your needs to sell.

Focus on what your targeted audience wants to respond to.

Go Beyond Social Media.

Don’t ever underestimate the influence from the social media.

Therefore, you should never ever give up on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and the rest.

Don’t just stop there.

You have to go more up-close and be more personal with your audience and go where not everyone else is going.

You must get your audience to opt-in to your email marketing campaign, where you can control the message.

That means by giving something of perceived value so that that could hang around.

It is not an easy task.

But the reward for successful content marketing could be enormous.

What is Organic Content Marketing?

According to the Marketing Institute, there were approximately 5000 of people advertisement every day.

When faced with this kind of competition for an audience’s attention, actually there are two approaches – Paid Marketing and Organic Marketing.

Paid marketing involves allocating a budget to your advertising campaign and paying countless platforms for the promotion.

On the other hand, organic content marketing is more finding ways on how to make customers look for you naturally.

In other words, you will be using any type of marketing method that does not require a direct payment.

But, there still will be incurred cost there.

This also includes paying for content creation and the time spent by monitoring the campaigns as well as responding to customers.

Thus, this type of inbound marketing involves giving valuable content that customers really desired.

Why Content Marketing?

In a simple word, an organic content marketing system is customer-centric, by focusing on giving your customers a seamless online experience.

Therefore, a quality and valuable content are needed to provide the ideal answer to questions and highlight why you have the best solution.

By establishing yourself as a good source of essential content, you will able to build an effective engagement with the customers.

In turn, you are building your brand.

Then again, this type of marketing requires time and tremendous effort, along with a good system which is essential to reap the rewards.

How to Content Marketing?

1. Know Your Platforms

Developing the content marketing system means putting the content in the right places.

It is crucial to have an understanding of the core demographics that your content will reach.

In facts, social media platforms do provide vibrant and instantly high-engaging audiences.

These audiences did comprise a staggering 42 per cent of the world population.

But, not all platforms are equal in terms of their marketing potential.

Just look at Instagram and Snapchat.

These social media platforms are where the younger audience usually is.

The statistic had revealed that there is 59 per cent of 18 to 29-year-old use Instagram.

2. Emphasis on Quality Content

Content is the key to everything in content marketing.

It all about how you are trying to build and engage with the audience.

That’s mean you need to make content that is easy for people to find, solve their problems, able to share with their friends.

And that is how you can establish the source of information that people would want to return again and again.

Furthermore, keywords play as an integral part of any strategy, as they help you to drive your content up to the search rankings.

So, start by establishing the keywords that are relevant to your business, and that you expect customers to search for.

Besides, the keywords may get eyes on your content.

But they probably won’t hold much about viewer’s interest.

You need something that could keep them engaged, but keyword stuffing won’t help you to achieve that.

This is why quality content is essential.

A well-written, well-researched content keeps people reading, as it resonates with them.

There are many ways to enhance the content.

For example, you can arrange or break down the materials into digestible sections.

The using of visually appealing infographics is strongly recommendable as a picture is worth a thousand words.

You also could create the content or videos that express ideas instantly and easy to share across the social media.

And don’t forget the links as well.

By creating a network of related content is important in keeping the viewers engaged with the constant stream of relevant information.

Thus increase the chance they can make the purchase.

Final Thoughts: Why is Content Marketing so important?

By now, you should know why content marketing plays an important role in today’s business.

Content marketing is a potential boon for your business, as it provides the material of info that the online user is searching for,

It may be a slow process that involves a long-term commitment to create or produce high-quality content while constantly interacting with customers through various online platforms.

A few articles for a month definitely are not enough!

If you really want to benefit from potentially over three times as much traffic, you will need to publish at least 16 articles per month.

In addition, if you are handling the campaign in the right manner, there is a chance for you to see sustainable growth in your brand and a deeper level of engagement with your customers.

Nevertheless, this resource-intensive approach may require you to outsource work in order to stay relevant and get the result that needs.

If you want to know more information about marketing please always visit us, Icon Marketing Strategy

Why long-term plan work best for the top content marketing companies?

Why long-term content planning is important to your business?

To start, planning provided a roadmap for your content.

You would not get into a car and drive without an end destination; you did be wasting petrol.

This is probably why 86% of highly effective organizations have someone to steering the direction of their content strategy.

At this point, you should know how important content is to your inbound marketing strategy.

But as a reminder, content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

It plays an integral part in each and every stage of the buyer’s journey.

When it comes to creating content, you want to remain as reactive and agile as you can to do your best to make the most of your time.

Having a plan will give you and your team the ability to remain reactive to upcoming initiatives.

It helps you to stay organised and proactively manage the content required for your marketing tasks.

Think of your long-term content plan like a saving account.

If your goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan, and you need to be consistent with the contributions.

The more consistent you are and the better you are with the contributions, the more you will get on your return on investment.

But in order to retire, you need to be consistent month-after-month.

Otherwise, you will miss your goals and the ability to retire.

The same can be said about your content.

If you make a plan and a consistent approach, then you are giving yourself the best chance at achieving ROI from your content efforts.

You will have the opportunity to grow an expansive library of content, making you and your business-content wealthy.

It is important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way, but at least you have your goals and direction set.

Having a plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand bandwidth and priorities for what needs to get done and when.

Another reason why you should have a long-term content plan is it helps you to stay organised.

Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one initiative at any given time.

A long-term plan accounts for all upcoming initiatives and provides the ability to be agile in your content creation process.

Being organised will also allow you to align with the overall goals of the business.

In essence, it gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization,

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team.

It should be about supporting the sales team, customer service team, products and services team and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured that your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most.

For example, attracting and attaining of your audience.

Lastly, the long-term planning allows the ability to tell a story by taking your audience down their buyer’s journey.

Remember, content is the fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running.

Having a relevant approach like this gives you the opportunity to answer your prospects’ questions and meet them at their point of need.

How Do The Best Content Marketing Company Build a Long-Term Content Plan?

Okay, now you know why it is important to have a long-term content plan.

Let’s actually learn how to do it.

Let’s take a moment to revisit the buyer‘s journey, as it has a similar corresponding marketing funnel, which also known as “marketing machine”.

The marketing machine relates each buyer’s journey stage to a corresponding marketing funnel stage – Awareness, Consideration and Decision stage.

Firstly, the awareness stage that related to visit and lead.

Secondly, the consideration stage that relates to the marketing qualified lead (MQL) and sales qualifies lead (SQL).

Lastly, the decision stage relates to opportunity and customer.

These funnels are designed to help you visualize and guide a prospect through the stages of the buyer’s journey.

So, you can effectively measure your funnel and provide a tailored message to that prospect at their particular stage during the buyer’s journey.

It is important to understand the relationship between both funnels as they are working towards the same goals.

The goals are attracting your prospects, converting them into leads and closing them into customers.

A marketing machine is not developed overnight.

It takes a lot of time and planning to build it.

This is where long-term content planning comes in.

The Importance of Long-Term Content Plan for Content Marketing Companies

So, what is involved in developing a long-term content plan?

There are 3 steps you must take to create a long-term content plan.

Step 1: Setting marketing goals.

Step 2: Auditing or assessing your organization’s initiatives and assets.

Step 3: Identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas.

The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content marketing initiatives.

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Setting marketing goals provides you with a long-term vision and short-term motivation.

It helps you to organize your time and resources so you can make the most of your content creation efforts.

Each piece of content created for marketing initiatives should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the overarching goals of the organization.

This will help you stay laser-focused with the content creation process.

Let’s take a second to think about this.

If your company’s quarterly customer foal is 15 new customers and you know the number of leads needed to generate 15 customers is 50 leads.

If you know the number of website visits needed to generate 50 leads is 1000 visits, then you need to take into consideration the content you needed to hit your visit goal.

Include SMART Goal in Your Plan

Each of the goals you set should be a SMART goal.

That is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.

A potential SMART goal example could be increased quarterly site visit by 30%.

That’s 5000 per quarter to 6000 per quarter by the end of the year.

The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization’s initiatives and assets.

Your audit is going to consist of two parts.

First, auditing your content assets, and second, auditing your event-based priorities.

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to help you identify all of the marketing assets that you have at your disposal.

And potentially identify gaps or opportunities in your content strategy.

There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.

Content has likely been created by you, your predecessors, or other individuals in the marketing department.

This including subject matter experts from other departments and is scattered just about everywhere.

By doing your content audit, you will be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save your hours of content creation time in the future.

When it comes to documenting a content audit, there should be a place for you to insert all of your assets.

Properly organize them based on the content title, buyer’s journey stage, marketing funnel stage.

You also should include the format or type of content, which buyer persona is targeting, and additional notes that provide value or content.

Now it is time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral.

You are recommended to systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically be hiding.

It is like that old file manager or marketing folder on your computer.

You can ask your sales team what type of collateral do they use.

Check in with the more tenured employees, you will be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here.

Pore through your customer relationship management system (CRM) and your content management system (CMS) as well.

Now, you might already get the picture here.

Thus, you are a step closer to be more efficient in creating a plan for your company.

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What is Content Marketing?

To start, what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process that focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action.

Even though content marketing has grown in popularity in the past ten years with the rise if web 2.0, content marketing is not a new concept.

In fact, one of the first signs of content marketing can be dated back to 4200 B.C, with a cave wall publishing on how to stay protected from wild boars.

The Evolution of Content Marketing for Business

Nowadays, the foundation for content marketing is pretty much the same.

It is all about your audience, what they value, and how you can help to educate them.

When done correctly, this helps to create a relationship with your audience, which leads to trust.

And if your audience trusts you, then they are willing to do business with you when they are ready to make a purchasing decision.

In order to communicate with your audience, you need to produce content.

Content is the message your content marketing strategy delivers.

It is what you are trying to deliver to your visitors, leads, customers and promoters.

There are a lot of different ways you can deliver a message- blogs, emails, website pages, social media, and print collateral.

But without content, you did have nothing to deliver.

The Importance of Content Marketing for Small Business

Content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

It plays an integral part in the Attract, Close, Convert and Delight stage.

Your content should attract the right people to your site, convert those people into leads, and nurture and help close them into customers.

But it does not stop there, as your content should always delight your customers, turning them into promoters of your brand.

In a nutshell, content marketing is really just the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell to them.

As opposed to marketing or advertising your products and services, you are creating helpful, entertaining content that your prospects and customers could enjoy and learn from.

If it sounds like inbound marketing and content marketing are similar, that is because they are.

They both focus on empowering potential customers, building a lasting relationship with your audience, and creating valuable content that both entertains and educates them.

But what is the difference between them, and why do you need both?

You should think in terms of “and” not “or” when it comes to the content marketing, inbound marketing relationship.

Success relies on both.

Content may help fuel your inbound engine, but there are similarly valuable inbound projects-like technical SEO, product or service trials, marketing automation, and interactive tools that may exist outside of the scope of a content marketer.

This is where inbound marketing comes in as a valuable counterpart.

If you aren’t opening yourself up to the wide range of inbound practices, then you are limiting the potential of growth and impact you can have as a marketer or marketing leader.

In other words, your inbound plan should be a superset-inclusive of your content assets but not limited to them.

There are implications for organizational structure, roles and responsibilities as well as skills procurement.

Why Do You Need to Develop a Content Marketing Business Model?

If you are just like most marketers, you always begin your content marketing efforts with the best intentions.

You should have some great ideas for content in order to resonate and connected well with the reader.

In order to do that, you should have some thoughts about places to promote that content.

You also need to find the resource as well as the time that you will require to develop an effective content marketing plan.

But the problem is that you don’t.

To fully realize the potential content marketing offers, it is crucial for you to have a plan.

It may sound cliché or simple, yet is a step that many content marketers disregarded or overlooked.

For your information, there is 70 per cent of marketers are lacking the consistent or integrated content strategy.

While only 29 per cent of leading marketers systematically reuse and repurpose the content.

The reason is easy – to create such a plan is not easy and daunting.

It requires the skills of content marketers to analyse where their marketing efforts have been and what is the objective to achieve in the future time.

The Value of a Content Marketing Plan

Indeed, the content marketing plan is more than just content.

Why is it so hard for content marketers to create such a strategic plan for their content?

This is because they do not take the strategic approach to the content plan to ensure the message cuts through the clutter and reaches your target audience with the right information at the right time.

The Importance of Having an Effective Content Marketing Business Plan

That goes without saying that having an effective content marketing plan is crucial for the next step that you will take.

Basically, the content marketing plan is your roadmap to a successful content marketing effort.

To get a good start, an effective strategic plan will clearly define the key elements of your effort,

It will clearly specify and outline clearly on who you will be talking to, what you will say and how you are going to say it, where the content will be promoted, and what is the chance of you will be the success.

By having this type of plan, it keeps everyone who involved in creating and sharing your content on the same page.

This helps to ensure you have sufficient resources to manage all aspect of a successful content campaign.

From writing and posting to sharing and tracking, each of your team members should understand and knows what needs to happen and when should happen.

Furthermore, you have the guide or roadmap that you could share with the others.

Inevitably, this helps to ensure that your content marketing goals are in alignment with and are fully supported for the goals of your organization.

Besides, by sharing the plan also gets other in your organization to buy into the role that content plays in making the organization to the successful path.

This does not just act a support for your efforts, but it also gives you a team of employees who are engaged and willing to share the company’s content.

Thus, by having a clear understanding of the value of your content marketing plan and strategy will provide a good head start for you!

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