Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Content marketing is a must-have in promoting any product. It is especially effective in attracting potential customers and gaining the trust of the audience.
But creating content alone does not ensure success, because it must be interesting and useful to your target audience. People are tired of information noise, and this is the main reason why content fails to resonate with the audience.
In this article, we will tell you what to do to make content marketing work for you.
1. Create a communication strategy
Before you create any content, you need to develop a communication strategy. After all, without knowing who you are doing it for and why, the effectiveness of the content is doomed to failure.
A communication strategy is a plan that defines how to communicate effectively with your target audience to achieve your goals.
It consists of the following questions:
2. Define a system for evaluating results
To track the effectiveness of your content strategy, it’s important to regularly analyze the results you’ve achieved. This way, you can optimize it and reach the desired results.
Social media analytics. You can analyze the effectiveness of content here using the built-in functionality — statistics from Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social networks. You will be able to track the following indicators:
Social media analytics also allows you to find out the results for the period of time you need.
Analytics of email campaigns. It is presented in services for creating and sending emails, such as SendPulse, eSputnik, and many others. Here you can see the following statistics:
- the number of sent and opened emails;
- click map — a part of the statistics report that displays your email with the number of clicks on each link;
- audience data: geography, gender, age, devices, etc;
- etc.
Google Analytics. This is a free online service that allows you to analyze data about website users.
With its help, you can track how many people have visited your website, including the number of conversions from external sources, blogs, social networks, and emails. You will also learn about the revenue generated by this.
For more detailed analytics, use utm tags in links to your website that will be placed on external resources. This will allow you to get more detailed information about the source of traffic.
3. Choose the platforms and channels to post content on
Think about what resources your target audience visits, research what type of content they prefer, etc. Knowing this, you will be able to choose the channels and platforms where your content will bring the expected result.
This is the difference between internal and external content marketing.
Internal content marketing is the placement of content on the company’s own resources: blog, social networks, and email newsletters.
External content marketing is the publication of content in thematic communities and channels, specialized media, and partner platforms.
Internal content marketing
General pages of the website
In today’s digital world, almost everyone uses the Internet to search for information, goods, and services. Therefore, having a website filled with quality content is critical for every business. Without it, even the use of social media or other tools to attract customers cannot be as effective as possible.
Therefore, task №1 is to fill the website with basic content:
The completeness of this information will help potential customers compare your business with competitors and make further decisions based on it.
Blog
A company blog is a part of a corporate website where expert articles, case studies, interviews, guides, event announcements, etc. are posted.
The purpose of such content is to increase user loyalty by demonstrating professional skills, personalizing the business, and converting a potential customer into an existing one.
Also, when developing a blog, you should not forget about SEO content optimization. The right keywords, meta tags, and URLs will help you drive more traffic to your website and improve your search engine rankings.
Company pages on social networks
A huge number of users are registered on social networks, all of whom are potential customers. If your target audience is on social media, your business must be present there!
This way, the brand gets closer to the customer, communicates with them through content, and helps them choose a product.
Interactive content, which is more popular today, helps to promote social media pages. It is aimed at expanding the audience — the more likes, comments, and reposts, the higher the reach and recognition of the company.
Email newsletters
Properly configured email marketing can bring in tens of thousands dollars a month. Read our case study to find out how we use it to reach up to $98,000 per month for Saas.
Here are the following business needs that can be solved with email campaigns:
— making sales through a chain of emails that “warm up” users to purchase;
— stimulating repeat purchases through reminder emails about the completion of a subscription, the release of a new/updated product, or promotional email chains;
— collecting feedback with survey emails;
— supporting users with service emails;
— increasing audience loyalty by sending useful and interesting content;
— announcement and engagement in events, sweepstakes, and other activities through situational emails;
— and more.
YouTube channel
The majority of people in the world are visuals who perceive information better visually. That’s why many of them watch a video about a product before making a purchase decision: a commercial, video testimonial, instruction, or presentation.
So if you think that YouTube is only suitable for news, videos with cute cats, and memes, you’re wrong. It’s a great opportunity to publish training videos, expert reviews, and much more. Your audience will definitely appreciate the value of your video content and will most likely make a positive decision to purchase your product.
External content marketing
News resources
These are websites, social media communities, or other platforms that provide users with up-to-date information about local events or news from around the world. They usually focus on different topics at the same time: politics, economics, science, culture, sports, etc. Because of this, the audience of news resources is wide. And the chance that your target audience will be present there is very high!
Specialized media
An expert review in specialized media helps to increase awareness, audience loyalty, and demonstrate professionalism.
Thematic groups and channels
These are communities of professionals on social media where experts offer their articles and case studies. Therefore, the content must be relevant to the group’s topic and have value to be published.
Affiliate placements
Publishing content on a partner’s platform is a great opportunity to expand your audience, attract potential customers, and increase awareness. The main thing is to create content that is relevant to your business and will be equally interesting and useful to your audience.
Learn how we write articles for external publishing on our client’s partner platforms in this case study.
4. Use different content formats
You can promote a product using different content formats to reach all segments of the target audience. For example, some people prefer videos, while others prefer long articles and detailed instructions.
Posts and articles
Comprehensive articles, guides, case studies, and other mostly textual materials are designed to satisfy the consumer’s interest and solve their problem, gradually leading them to purchase the product.
Infographics
Infographics are used to present information visually to make it easier to understand and draw attention to something important. It can be used to visualize facts, figures, lists, tables, statistics, and analytics.
Video
As we mentioned earlier, many people find it easier to absorb information from videos. This format is especially suitable for instructions and expert reviews.
Podcasts
This format is ideal for those who perceive information by ear or those who do not have time to read or watch something. Podcasts are most often used by companies that provide educational and consulting services.
5. Create a content plan
Content is a kind of communication with the target audience, which should be regular. Otherwise, users will simply forget about you and choose your competitors.
A content plan, in turn, helps to make the promotion of your business through content constant, systematic, and effective.
A content plan is a schedule for creating and posting company publications for a certain period of time.
This is not just a list of topics for publication, but a multifunctional tool for business promotion, as you choose what tasks the content will solve next month and look for a suitable content solution before that.
We have explained in detail how to create a content plan in our article.
6. Interact with your audience
Interaction on social media and other platforms allows businesses to establish communication with their audience, get their opinions and receive feedback. That’s why it’s important to respond promptly to users’ messages and comments. This way, you will increase their loyalty to your brand.
Conclusion
Creating content just for the sake of having it will doom your business to failure. Effective content marketing is based on a strategy, selection of appropriate platforms and channels, variety of content types, communication with the audience, and analytics.
Adherence to these components will make content marketing effective for your business. This will help you achieve your goals: from improving brand awareness to increasing the number of customers and sales.
Read more articles about content marketing on the Solve Marketing blog.
