Part of the modern answer to this question is content creation. Companies that produce the highest quality and quantity content relevant to their industry are often very popular among consumers, earning both interest and enthusiasm for their good/service. If you can create a video, blogpost, song, etc., you are generating a considerable amount of potential business for you firm through content marketing. Behind the final product of a quick video or blog post, there is a much greater attention to detail than meets the eye. The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) online outlines the five key steps in a content marketing endeavor. Although CMI only scratches the surface of conceptual depth with these five pillars, they remain an excellent structure to serve as a starting point for you own content marketing work. For each pillar, I will expand the topic to provide a deeper understanding of the concept.
1. Understand Your Audience
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Similar to segmenting the market in search of a key target market, content creators must gain a clear perspective on their most-likely audience. Marketers employ all data available to them (surveys, interviews, web analytics) to compile demographic information on potential segments. Once you gain a reasonable understanding of your target market(s), the next step is to:
- Create buyer persona: create an educated and accurate narrative to depict the life and personality of the typical customer.
This "character" makes quite a useful tool when selecting the topic of content for production. By providing material that is interesting and relevant to our buyer persona, we see a boost of engagement with the webpage. For example, HubSpot Academy presents the situation of the Cool Kevin preferring a more creative content experience, whereas Boring Bob likes less eventful data rich content. You are probably reading this article with the intention of improving your knowledge of content marketing, which would make you a decent Marketing Mike!
2. Coordinate with Buyer's Journey
This step requires a comprehensive plan for all phases of the purchasing process, so prospective customers can be shown content relevant to them in that stage of purchase. From the perspective of CMI, the purchase process can be broken down into three stages: awareness, consideration, and determination.
- Awareness: increasing your target market's knowledge of the existence of your brand. As opposed to the traditional marketing environment, modern marketing focuses more on the competition for attention in the digital world, rather than ad space in the physical world.
- Post blog articles, educational content, etc.
- Consideration: continuing to foster consumer intrigue with the product. The customer is now aware of the product, and is one step closer to making the purchase decision.
- Case studies, product demonstrations, etc.
- Determination: Converting a marketing lead into a sales lead, as well as a sales lead into a sale. The customer makes a purchase decision and their opinion of the brand continues to be affected post-purchase.
- Free trials, live demonstrations, customer service.
HubSpot and CMI assert quality points in their similar description of content marketing: create content relevant to the industry, rather than brand, speak to the right audience at the right time, in the right place. To some degree, CMI and HubSpot neglect the entertainment side of content marketing, where the sole purpose of a message is to acquire attention from the target market. According to Outbrain.com, a key component to garnering attention in the industry is to focus on producing viral videos. According to Outbrain.com, "content that is fun, dynamic, and playful is what goes viral." Even if a brand must deviate from the tone of their overall identity, a light-hearted viral video could achieve a drastic increase in consumer awareness.
3. Create the Content
The most important thing to remember when in the process of creating content is that you are delivering a product for the consumption of others. In other words, it is in your best interest to produce content that is as user-friendly and easily digestible as possible. CMI and HubSpot suggest a slew of best practice tips to help achieve that goal.
The Content Marketing Institute has a heavily academic perspective, explaining that most of their traffic was generated by clicks on research content over any other type of content. CMI also suggests using longer, more in depth blog posts, rather than shallower, briefer posts.
HubSpot Academy's segment on content creation, however, advised not to choose quantity over quality. It is crucial, however, to maintain the relevance of the blog with the aforementioned buyer personas. The HubSpot process for producing content involves three steps: purpose, format, and topic. Purpose refers to the offer from the business or the educational blog post, the reason for the content existing at all. Format refers to the manner in which the information is collected and delivered. If the data was collected in an interview, the format of the blogpost would be much more of a question-and-answer type post. Topic refers to the logical progression of purpose and format, Combining the buyer persona and the buyer's journey into one great circumstance and heavily increase the chance of an additional item.
4. Promote Content
Promotion of one's educational content is somewhat self explanatory. HubSpot Academy suggests that when the material goes live, all involved employees immediately share the page on all possible individual levels of social media. The sharing of quality content will eventually distribute naturally, but it is certainly helped along by an initial burst of traffic. Another way to promote content on a blog is by adding call to action buttons in the side bar, which would specifically address the reader, perhaps prompting a donation or other generous action.
Aside from personal promotion, firms can also drive traffic by investing in an ad system. According to CMI, there are three popular types of digital content marketing campaigns. A Google Ads campaign could be effective, but significantly high in cost. A social media campaign would gain increased exposure, but unfortunately not as much conversion. An email marketing campaign is generally a good idea, reaching many potential customers who are already involved, but email calls-to-action are usually unresponsive.
5. Measure and Analyze
After you submit your work, the ensuing traffic data could prove to be quite valuable, so be sure to frequently check back and measure which metric benchmarks were and weren't hit. Although page views are the most common (and arguably most indicative) statistics used in measuring webpage performance, patterns can be found and recorded in fields like subject matter, user demographics, etc.
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