Content marketing is a cost-effective way of attracting an ongoing flow of organic web traffic and creating new leads, at the same time as reinforcing the brand personality and generating target-customer awareness through valuable and relevant content.
To justify the associated expense of creating content, you’ll need a business case. What are the desired outcomes? Are there any risks involved and what is the vision for success? Do you have the resources internally, or the budget to outsource? Have you identified the customer needs and considered how you can meet them via the curated content? Ultimately, what is the unique value to be added through content?
You’ll need to start by defining the content goals at the same time as considering how these meet the overall mission of the business. Additionally, how will the Content Strategy support your SEO Strategy and the wider communications activity?
You’ll need to create audience personas, assuming you have considered, and segmented, your target market, you can expand on this by considering their online behaviours. You need to ask yourself if the intended content will solve the audience’s challenges. It is also useful to conduct a content audit, in which you’ll review your current content. Often, it can be repurposed to suit the Content Strategy.
Assuming you already have your keywords defined, you need to consider the messages you want to communicate and the customer touchpoints throughout the target audience’s journey to purchase or engage with you. Developing a Content Funnel will help with this process. It’s also important to think about your online competitors and how you’ll differentiate, as well as identify the platforms where your story will be shared. We also recommend some Content Mapping so you can make the most of link building.
Are you using a content management system(CMS) to manage and schedule the creation and publication of content? If not, is this something you need? If you are, is it the most suitable for your requirements?
How will you create the content? Will you start a blog, publish videos, write white papers, produce infographics? There a many different ways to share your content and it’s important to consider which of these are the most suitable and relevant.
An editorial calendar is advised to keep momentum - but some flexibility should be allowed for timely content too.
We support businesses who want to make the most of the content they’re already writing or to provide direction on the way they can harness content to win business. Content Marketing is now firmly on the agenda for most marketing teams but, and we see it time and time again, unless it speaks to their audience in the right way and remains focused on contributing to the bottom line, these efforts will inevitably be wasted. We will walk you through the entire process and leave you with a strategy that will empower you to start curating great content with the aim of achieving brilliant results.
