Content, content, content.
That’s what everyone has been talking about lately, especially with the growth of online business that affects the whole commerce world. The existence of content is then infused into marketing effort; thus, creating a term Content Marketing.
If you haven’t signed up to be one of the business owners or marketers who apply content marketing, you may probably want to start soon.
Right at this moment, some questions might be popping in your head.
What exactly is Content Marketing? Why do I have to do it? Because it’s a trend? What if I don’t want to do it? How to do it?
To give you enlightenment, this article will answer those questions.
WHAT IS CONTENT MARKETING?
Welcome to the land of Content Marketing, where business and customers are connected through a strong long wire.
The Content Marketing Institute defines the term as … “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.”
Let’s break down that explanation.
“Strategic marketing approach” means that content marketing is more than just a common content. It needs to be executed with strategy and careful planning. Why is that?
The answer relies on the next part of the sentence: “ to drive profitable customer action”. The action here refers to mostly purchase action, the final stage of all marketing efforts. In order to make this happen, new customers need to know and like the business/product first, and the existing consumers need to stick with us and not switching to another brand.
Which is why every brand, every business owner, every marketer are competing in making their content “visible” in the eyes of the audience.
A lot of content creation practices are done to steal the spotlight, from creating articles, blog, video, audio, infographic, webinar, and many others. The most common practice is by default creating articles and blogs, but content rendition can actually be as wide as possible as long as it is relevant to your business identity and audience profile.
STARTING CONTENT MARKETING: STEP BY STEP
By now, you should have got the idea of what is content marketing. To continue, here are 7 steps of starting content marketing that you can follow.
“What? 7 Steps?”
Don’t get overwhelmed yet because some of the steps may have already been available in your pocket.
- PLANNING
As we mentioned earlier, content marketing requires strategy because it has a clear business purpose, not just a general reading material. You need to align the purpose of creating content with your business. Who are you? What do you want to bring to your audience? What’s in it for them that they have to choose you as their “partner”?
After that, set the goal for the content. What do you want to achieve? Is it for brand reputation? Brand awareness? Increasing website traffic? Increase social media followers/engagement? Or for promoting a specific campaign? This is important because for every goal, the strategy to use will be different. A strategy to increase social media engagement may not be applicable for campaign promotion due to differences in expectation and audience behavior.
In that sense, knowing who you are and what you want will lead to a clear consistent guideline that will be implemented throughout your whole content.
Most importantly, it will make it easier to create a journey mapping on how the content you create can benefit your business and convert to revenue.
- CREATE CUSTOMER PERSONA
Now this step, you may have already done it.
Customer persona or buyer persona shows who your customers are and what motivates them to purchase your products. It is what is usually used to create market segmentation that helps the business direction. It can be acquired through demographic, psychographic, and geographic.
(link to article about psychographic)
Based on those measuring factors, you will find that your customers actually consist of different groups of people. These groups have different profile, different hobbies, and different purchase behaviors, which is why your content should also be divided into groups following each group’s characteristics.
The more relevant your content to customer persona, the more they will feel connected to you; hence, forming a strong business-customer bond.
- KEYWORD RESEARCH
The next step is doing keyword research. The reason why this is important is so that the content will be even more relevant to the topics that your target audience are interested in within your business area.
The research should be done by looking at the customer persona that has been created to see what kind of topics they usually seek on search engine.
A common tool that is used to research keywords is Google Adwords.
- CREATE CONTENT GUIDELINE + CONTENT PLAN
Content guideline is a bible that should be created based on point #1 and #2 to encourage consistence and relevance in all your content posts. Although a business should always take customers’ preference into account, brand identity should always be carried as a statement of who you are and what makes you different from the competitors.
Meanwhile a content plan is a schedule and breakdown of what content you will create for a certain period of time and how you will create them, based on step #1 and #2. You might also want to include the PIC and the time schedule for execution and evaluation.
- CREATE THE CONTENT
Follow the content plan that you have created to create content. Make sure at this step, everything from step 1 to 4 is already done and clear, so the content can be produced effectively with effective result.
Also, ensure that the contents are all optimized based on SEO elements in order to have good visibility on the search engine. Because let’s face it, a lot of people discover a new website or product just from searching on Google.
- OPTIONAL: PROMOTE AS AN AD
The content is already in hands, now what else can you do?
If you want to improve its visibility and also to increase your traffic faster, you can put your content as an advertisement on Google or social media. Your ads will be shown only to people within your target audience criteria; hence, higher chance of getting a click or even engagement.
This is just an optional step for those who want to boost their contents and visibility.
- MONITORING AND EVALUATION
Whether you prefer to utilize ads or not, every content needs monitoring and evaluation. This is so you can know what kind of practice that works and doesn’t work and also what to improve for the next content plan based on the previous performance.
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Like what you‘re reading so far? You can also have this kind of content on your website by contacting AlpharusMedia. We are a dedicated digital marketing agency in Singapore with experience in content creation, so our contents are based on a thorough keyword research and then optimized to be SEO friendly. We can also help you to boost your content through Search Engine Marketing and FB ad if you want faster results. Contact us here.