ooking to improve brand awareness and build stronger relationships with your audience? Consider incorporating content marketing into your marketing strategy. Content marketing allows you to create value for both existing and potential customers, as well as generate buzz around your products or services through written, video, audio, and visual content.
Content marketing has relatively low up-front costs and is an evergreen strategy for your business. In a 2023 global study by SEMRush, reported generating success through their content marketing efforts. Of the most successful respondents, 77% planned to increase their content budgets through 2023.
There are multiple financial and reputational benefits to content marketing. In this article, we'll look at those benefits and explore how to create an effective content marketing campaign that speaks to your audience.
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Defining content marketing
Content marketing is a strategic approach to engaging consumer audiences with relevant and valuable information. It's an accessible marketing tactic for businesses of any size, but it's particularly vital for smaller organizations looking to expand their reach.
Unlike traditional advertising, content marketing doesn't require paying per message. If you have a website, you can create a blog and post as often as you want. Other strategies include making YouTube videos, publishing on LinkedIn or Medium, and writing case studies about your recent successes.
The central component of content marketing is audience value. Wherever you post, you must share information and insights your target customers will appreciate and use. The more valuable your content is, the more likely people will return for more.
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Understanding your target audience
Every business has a unique target audience. The more you know about your audience's needs and why you're the best one to meet those needs, the more effective your content will be. Here's how to get that information.
Conducting market research
Market research allows you to identify your target customers. It identifies who they are, what motivates them, and why they need your offering.
Start by looking at what your current customers have in common. Competitor data also offers helpful information and is relatively simple to find 鈥 visit a competitor's social media page and look at its followers for insight.
Consider doing some industry research as well. Sites such as gather data from various industries and will show you who's buying in your sector. This information is free to access.
Creating buyer personas
Market research tells you about your audience as a group. To create engaging content, picture each audience sub-group as an individual. When you write with a real person in mind, your content becomes more relatable and vibrant.
Buyer personas help tremendously. A buyer persona is a fictionalized consumer based on actual audience characteristics. Ideally, each persona correlates with a target audience segment鈥攁 category of buyers that share needs, pain points, and buying behaviors.
For example, if you're a career coach, one of your audience segments might be midlife career changers. Turn that segment into a fleshed-out persona by identifying that type of client's key demographics and interests.
Then, you're not writing for "someone looking for a new career." You're writing for Melissa, a 42-year-old middle school teacher who wants to pivot to a tech career.
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Setting clear content marketing goals
According to the Content Marketing Institute's (CMI's) 2022 reports, approximately three-quarters of and content marketers use defined goals to measure content performance. Respondents say their most valuable goals relate to website and email engagement, customer conversions, and site traffic.
As you develop your business's content marketing goals, try to make them as SMART as possible. are:
- Specific: Addresses a particular problem or works toward a specific business goal
- Measurable: Is trackable or countable
- Achievable: Attainable given your team's resources and abilities
- Relevant: Related to your business's mission and broad goals
- Time-bound: Has defined start and end dates
Develop your SMART goals by identifying your broader targets and narrowing them down. Think of what aspects of your marketing you want to enhance, then find a measurable way to pursue it. Here are some places to start, inspired by goals common to the :
- Create brand awareness
- Build credibility and trust with audiences
- Educate audiences about your product or service
- Build loyalty among existing customers
- Generate demand and leads
Pinpoint one of these or another broad marketing goal, then consider how you would measure success. If you were to choose 鈥淏uild loyalty among existing customers鈥, for example, your SMART goal might be to increase the number of marketing email opens by 10% over a three-month period.
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Developing a content strategy
Before you start writing your first blog post, you need a map of what you plan to publish, where you plan to publish it, and how you'll get the word out. Here's how those three processes work.
Content creation
To start content marketing for your business, list topics for each audience segment. Ask yourself what pain points and needs you want to address. Then, consider how you could introduce those topics in educational ways.
For example, imagine you offer accounting services to businesses and families. You might decide to cover college savings planning, retirement strategies for entrepreneurs, and tax planning for business owners.
Once you have a list of ideas, put them into a content calendar. Start one in your existing calendar or workflow planning software, or try one of the many available.
As you develop your content schedule, choose a format for each piece. According to a recent , short articles are the most popular format by a significant margin, but videos drive strong results.
Finally, start considering and documenting your brand voice and style. Your voice is how you speak to your audience. For example, some brands are more formal than others. Some use humor, and others are more serious.
Your brand style is your voice plus other elements such as your logo, color scheme, etc. Your ultimate goal is to define these elements in a formal style guide you can reference during content creation.
Content distribution
Content distribution gets your content in front of its target audiences. Job number one is choosing the right platform, so you have the best chance of reaching people who will engage with what you publish.
Most distribution platforms fall into one of three categories:
- Owned media: Channels such as your website, email newsletter, and blog, which your brand has control over
- Shared media: Social media and similar platforms that let you post for free but have algorithms that control who your content reaches
- Paid media: Platforms and opportunities, such as influencer marketing or with publishing partners, that let you pay for exposure
Look for channels that match your content's tone and style to attract your target audience. Also, when publishing on shared and paid media channels, present your content in ways that encourage engagement in the form of comments or shares.
Content promotion
To maximize the number of viewers who engage with your content, highlight its helpfulness and relevance to every audience who sees it.
For example, suppose you use your email newsletter to link to your newest blog post. You want your subscribers to click on the link instead of scrolling past, so include an introduction that connects the content to a common audience pain point.
Paid promotional channels, such as soc