According to Assignment Masters, a
company providing essay writing services, as the strategy becomes more popular
every year, more marketers are joining the trend. If you're a beginner at
content marketing, here are 6 important lessons that can jumpstart your
campaign's success.
1. What Content
Marketing Is and Isn't
There are a lot of different ways
to reach your audience on the internet, so some get confused about which
strategy is which.
Content marketing essentially
involves creating relevant content that offers value to your target market
audience, which you then distribute and promote in order to encourage your
audience towards a certain action (usually, making a purchase).
The marketing strategy developed
as a response to the growing ineffectiveness of traditional marketing tactics,
like TV ads, direct mailers, billboards, etc.
Content marketing is an inbound
marketing strategy -- meaning that you're trying to draw people to you, as
opposed to an outbound strategy, where you try to catch the attention of your
audience with interruptive marketing tactics.
Content marketing is about
answering people's questions and finding ways to solve their problems, which
encourages them to become loyal customers.
2. Always Set
Measurable Goals
Before you do anything else as a
content marketer, you need to determine exactly what you want to get out of it.
Content marketing can be a
valuable strategy for a wide variety of business goals, such as:
·
Increasing brand
awareness
·
Generating leads
·
Reaching sales
goals
·
Encouraging
customer loyalty
You should identify some general
goals you want to achieve with content marketing, but try to make them specific
and measurable, so that you can analyze your success later on.
For example, if I want to increase
brand awareness, I could set these goals:
·
Increase overall
web traffic by 5% each month
·
Increase social
media followers by 30% this quarter
·
Get 500 more
email subscribers this year
Each of these goals are specific,
indicate a desired amount and specify a time frame. Set goals like these, but
remember that you can update and adjust them later on.
3. Develop Buyer
Personas to Create Targeted Content
Content marketing is all about
speaking to your target audience on a personal level. You want to be able to
connect with their inner thoughts, feelings, and needs in a way that
traditional advertising never can.
The best way to create this ultra-targeted
content is by leveraging buyer personas.
Buyer personas are basically a
snapshot of your ideal, target customer. For example, a B2B software developer
might target mid-level business executives.
Depending on your brand and
industry, you may want to develop primary and secondary buyer personals for
different sub-groups within your audience.
Use these detailed personas to
brainstorm content that resonates with them.
Consider these key areas when
developing your buyer personas:
·
Age, sex,
nationality
·
Education level
·
Employment
experience
·
Income level
·
Personal life
·
Thoughts and
emotions
4. Focus on Your
Audience's Needs
One major pitfall that many
content marketers fall into is focusing too much on their own business goals.
By only developing content that
is ultra-geared towards driving sales, marketers overlook the real needs of
their audience -- which is the whole point of content marketing.
The primary purpose of any piece of content
should be answering
your audience's questions and
addressing their needs. Getting them to buy should be the secondary purpose.
Avoid overly-salesy content, and
instead think of how your product or service can be presented as a solution to
your audience's unique problems.
5. Don't Forget
to Promote
Content marketing isn't just
about developing targeted material. Half the job is about making sure you
expose your content to the right people.
Even if your website has great
SEO, the only way to be really competitive as a content marketer is by making
efforts to promote your content.
Some basic promotion strategies include:
·
Building an
audience on social media and distributing your content to them
·
Submitting your
blog posts to content communities
·
Working with
influencers to broaden your reach
·
Using paid
promotion methods (especially on social media)
6. Analyze Your
Efforts
Content marketing is far from a
one-time tactic. You need to constantly be brainstorming, creating and
distributing in order to remain on top of the game.
Some marketers are so caught up
in the process that they forget to stop and evaluate the results of their
efforts.
But if you don't analyze your
strategy, there's no way to improve it to become more targeted.
And the more you can analyze and
adjust, the more it will pay off. Hubspot's recent research found that inbound
marketers who check their analytics three or more times per week had a greater
ROI for their efforts than those who don't.
Make use of Google Analytics and
any other data from your social media automation platform to make your content
marketing strategy as targeted as possible. Think back to the goals you created
in the beginning, and see how good your strategy is at achieving them.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a huge
undertaking. Many marketers will tell you that there's a big learning curve
before you can become really great at it.
That said, if you pay attention
to these 6 important lessons, you'll be way ahead of everyone else who's just
starting out with you
Source: www.inc.com
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