What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing contains techniques and strategies for obtaining measurable results through content. It consists in creating quality content, able to educate, explain, inform, entertain in order to attract visitors, convert them into customers and retain them and then turn them into brand ambassadors.
According to Content Marketing Institute
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach 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.”
«Content Marketing helps a brand to become more discoverable and to establish a clear brand personality. It helps you to engage with followers and generate leads, but it also helps with SEO ranking». (NP Marketing)
How to develop a Content Marketing strategy
Each Content Marketing strategy must be planned and developed over the medium or long-term and then analyzed to measure the results and check the effective return on investment.
To be able to create a Content Marketing plan, it is a good idea to ask yourself what are the benefits you want to bring to your business, who to turn to and how.
The creation of a useful editorial plan provides for a precise planning of the activities to be followed.
- The first step is: have an idea of the objectives to be achieved. Here you need to understand what your company needs
- Do you need to get Leads, that is, potential customers who have the real possibility of becoming real customers?
Then use the contents to get useful contacts.
- Do you need to work on your image?
Take advantage of what you publish to position your name.
- Do you need to receive quality backlinks?
Earn money through the contents. Hyperlinks are essential factors to record interesting results with respect to search engine rankings.
- Do you need to reach people and improve your relationship with them?
Take advantage of email marketing whose contents will feed the messages.
- The second step is dedicated to the analysis and definition of the target and the context.
TARGET: You need to understand what others and your competitors do from the content marketing strategy point of view.
Here you can use appropriate tools to get good results, including advanced SEO tools to see the result of certain content on the SERP and link earning activity. SEMrush allows you to compare different domains.
CONTEXT: Regarding the context, you have to analyze what concerns your company to have a description of the initial situation so you can then clearly understand what are the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
Only in this way can you understand what the needs to satisfy for your project are.
3. At this point you should have clear strategy to use, your context, your competitors, who you should address and how, you can go to define, refine or change your initial objectives and how to measure them.
4. The fourth step is to choose the channels and tools to use for your strategy.
Blog, YouTube channel and social media – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Google+, Vimeo, and Pinterest – it’s up to you to choose which channel you can communicate better with by remembering that for different social networks different contents, schedules, and strategies are needed.
But above all what contents do you intend to use to realize your Content Marketing?
Blog posts, videos, images, e-books, infographics, guides, webinars, events, seminars, and presentations are examples of engaging content that can give your target added value.
You can also focus on brand storytelling, native advertising, video marketing, and podcasts.
Fundamental aspects of the creation of contents are: the message underlining each content, the communicative style, the tone of voice and the language to be used.
It is good to consider also how to distribute the available budget, with which timing and with which communication methods.
- The next step involves drafting the editorial calendar because, without proper, and effective promotional activity, your content is non-existent.
In the editorial calendar, you have to define day by day, by the week or monthly which topics to deal with, the main keywords and any useful links.
You should also define precise dates and times for content on social media, email, and newsletters.
- The results obtained depend on the objectives: there are simpler and more complex content marketing actions to be measured.
The tools market used to measure the success of content marketing actions and to keep in mind all the relevant numbers is very wide. Among the most famous are:
- Google Analytics: one of the most popular analysis tools, free in its basic version and can be integrated into virtually every blog or website. This tool allows the analysis of all the most important numbers and channels, based on the users who visited the page;
- Piwik: an open source analysis platform, which represents a valid alternative to Google Analytics, especially for users who care about protecting their data;
- Socialbakers: it serves to make an exact analysis of the results of their social media campaigns. Furthermore, the performance of individual links can be evaluated, thus allowing a greater optimization of the sharing strategy;
- Talkwalker: offers great possibilities of analysis for whatever happens on their web pages, and also shows you how users have reached their destination.
Conclusion
With our content, we can anticipate the needs of our public and in some cases but also persuade it in the choice of purchase of a product or the use of a service.
So in marketing the knowledge of the psychological aspects is fundamental and for this reason, we know that the contents must provoke an emotion – that is also true for the informative and informative contents – and not be cold and detached.
Considering the emotional state in the creation of contents helps to create and maintain a human relationship with the user, arousing curiosity towards our product transforming it from lead to actual customer.
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