Your customers, leads, and audience members want valuable content from your business. This content needs to reach your audience members in a way that feels natural. Effective content marketing can do just that. As a result, it can increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, and so much more. While content marketing can seem overwhelming, we created this brief guide to help you. 

Content Marketing

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. It can boost your brand awareness, sales, reach, loyalty, and interactions. Along with this, it can educate your leads and prospects about what you have to offer and how it can solve their problems. 

Like stated about, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural. The most common way of doing this is by creating a narrative for your content and telling a story. By doing this, your content will feel more authentic and engaging. 

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing that you can choose to incorporate into your strategy. Below, we will talk about some of the most common.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media has been on the rise over the past few years. There are a number of platforms that you can work with. The most common platforms for companies to use are Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter. There are countless ways that you can create and share content on them. 

Infographic Content Marketing

Infographics allow you to display information and data in an easy-to-understand graphic format. They’re a great way to effectively communicate your content by mixing simple wording, short statements, and clear images. They work best if you’re trying to distill an educational or complex message so that all of your audience members can understand it.

Blogs

Blogs allow for a lot of creativity in terms of their purpose and topics. With a blog, you can promote other internal and external content with links. You can also add social media share buttons or incorporate any product information. 

Content Marketing Strategy

When it comes to your content marketing strategy, you want to make sure that you cover all your bases and make the most out of it. Below, we will break that list down for you.

Set SMART goals

The first thing you want to do when it comes to your content marketing strategy is set SMART goals. Here are a few examples: improve brand awareness, boost revenue, increase conversions, and increase customer engagement. 

Determine your KPIs

You’ll want to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your SMART goals. These are quantifiable data points that you can use to measure your actual performance. If you have a goal to improve brand awareness, your KPI can be site traffic, social media followers or subscription sign-ups. If you want to increase customer engagement, you can track your likes, shares, follows and mentions. 

Decide on the type of content

You need to choose what type of content you’ll create. To do this, start by thinking about your target audience and buyer personas. The following questions can help you narrow down the right types of content for them: What challenges are they looking to overcome? Why do they need your product or service? How can you help them succeed? 

Choose your content channels

Once you know what type of content you’ll use, you need to choose what content channels to use. The easiest way to think about this is what social media channels you will use to put out your content. 

Set a budget

Now it’s time to set your budget. You need to think about the type of content that you’re creating and what channels you’re marketing that content on. You’ll need to take into consideration if you need to purchase any software to help create the content like Adobe Photoshop. Also, you need to think about if you need to hire outside help to create the content. 

Create and distribute content

You need to create and distribute your content so that your audience members can consume it. A social media calendar can help you stay on track and make sure that everything goes out on time. 

Analyze and measure results 

Lastly, you need to analyze and measure your results so that you can make any necessary changes. You can look back to your SMART goals and KPIs to determine the success of your content marketing strategy.