We’ve all heard it before… “Content is king.”
But what does that even mean? And where do you start if you hope to ascend the marketing throne?
Neil Patel defines content marketing as:
“…a long-term strategy, based on building a strong relationship with your target audience, by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.”
It allows you to be someone’s guide as they go through their decision-making process. Which is key because buyers today guide themselves through as much as 90% of their purchase-decision process before ever engaging with a brand or its sales team.
That means, by the time you’re attempting to sell them, they’ve already developed strong opinions about many important decision factors. Wouldn’t you love to guide and influence those opinions?
With a strong content strategy, you can be their backseat guide as they tackle their challenges and learn what an ideal solution looks like. When it comes time to buy they will already have established strong trust with you and your brand’s values.
Content was crowned king because it provides three mission critical advantages to your marketing efforts that all contribute to the bottom line.
Increased Brand Awareness
As customers are searching for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems, they are more likely to discover your product and brand via helpful content.
Stronger Customer Relationships and Loyalty
Customers will view you as an authority on the subject and you will win their trust early which will make selling to them so much easier later.
As your content creates value to readers, you will also develop a sense of reciprocity. As marketing rockstar & tech investor Gary Vaynerchuk talks about in his book “The Thank You Economy.”
Essentially, when customers are ready to make a purchase decision, they will already feel loyal to you and feel compelled to give you their business because you’ve already provided them with so much value.
Long-lasting, low-cost traffic, leads, and sales.
It’s true that content marketing isn’t the cheapest way to boost sales in the short-term. It can take months to start seeing the real ROI and it takes time and money up front to start generating free content.
But if it’s done well, the growth that good content will bring is a perpetual and will only compound as you add more resources.
A good content strategy grabs customers at every stage of their decision-making process and it may take awhile for them to turn into paying customers. But this is actually a great thing as consumers spend an average of 79 days conducting online research before buying. The sooner you catch them in that process, the better your chances of closing the sale.
Some of the most successful companies in the world like Intel, IBM, and American Express all attribute their success to years of content marketing. But it’s not a strategy reserved for these elites, let’s take a look at how you can develop your content marketing efforts on any budget.
The key to winning at content marketing is well-developed planning. Throwing up some random blog posts when you have time won’t do. You need to have a solid content strategy.
Step 1. Know Your Goal
Before you do anything else, outline what you hope to achieve with your content marketing. More leads? More sales? More email subscribers?
How does it fit into your overall marketing and sales efforts? This part is very dependent on your business and objectives. There’s no single right answer, but Hubspot developed a nice free template to help you figure it out.
Step 2. Define Your Market
Hopefully, you already know your target market and have developed robust buyer personas. If not, you need to stop and do that now.
If you need help, we put together this infographic for you all about the science of building buyer personas.
Step 3. Map Out Your Typical Customer Journey
Once you know who your customers are, think about how they go from problem-haver to solution-buyer.
Most customers move through three key phases – awareness, interest, and evaluation.
During the first phase, customers become aware of the problem they have. They may have noticed it themselves, but it’s also possible that they realized it based on the content you generated. For example, maybe before this article, you didn’t realize that your business needed to have a content marketing strategy.
Describe the emotional state of your customers at each step in the process. What questions are they asking? What concerns do they have?
Step 4. Develop Content Ideas
While you’re figuring what questions customers are asking through their decision-making process, think of how you can position content to answer those questions and ease their concerns.
Where can you step in and help them move toward the next phase in their process?
You should always focus on providing value to your customer by helping them learn or improve in some way. If it’s quality help they can’t find elsewhere, even better.
One way to tackle this challenge is to ask yourself, “what is my business uniquely qualified to talk about?” That’s what Intel does to grow one of the leading IT blogs in the world.
If you’re still stuck after that, don’t fret – there are tons of tools and strategies to generate great content ideas. Try a bunch, and find out what works best for you.
Step 5. Select Your Medium
Many content marketers start out by writing a series of blog posts. That’s a really good option. It’s straight-forward and easy to self-produce or outsource.
But it’s not your only option. There are plenty of ways to create engaging content. Here are just a few:
- Blog posts
- eBooks
- PDF Templates & Checklists
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
The most important consideration here should be what format would most appeal to your audience. Fitness companies, for example, have been producing tons of video content over the past few years but digital marketing is still primarily taught via long-form writing and guides.
You may also want to consider what resources you have available. Starting a blog can be as easy as logging into WordPress and typing some words. Producing quality video content may require a bit more investment in time and money.
Finally, you’ll need to decide if you plan to gate your content or not. Gated content requires the reader to give you something, usually an email address, in exchange for access to the content. It’s usually embedded inside existing content as an incentive to subscribe.
You’ve probably noticed examples of this all over the Single Grain Blog. In fact, here’s one:
Gated content is great for collecting emails and pulling customers deeper into your funnel. But it also puts a barrier between the reader and your information. So you need a balance and should be strategic about when you use it.
Generally, you want to target gated content at customers in the middle “information” phase of their decision-making process as they’re getting ready to buy….
Step 6. Publish!
As you expand your content strategy, you’ll want to develop a detailed editorial calendar planning out all your major themes and campaigns for the year and then breaking down specific content monthly and even weekly.
But if you’re starting out let’s go a little slower. You’ll be learning and improving a lot over the first few months so there’s no point in stressing about what you’ll be publishing 12 months from now.
Take a look the next 90 days. Take your best content ideas from step 4 and map them out across the next 3 months. This will help you publish in an organized fashion and craft a narrative over time.
Writing with a narrative or theme in mind helps subscribers use your information and encourages them to spend more time on your site reading each post.
Your post about how to choose the best home automation products should probably come after the one where you explain the benefits and uses of home automation. You can then link the content together so readers flow from one article to the next.
You should also consider holidays and trends that are relevant to your market. Obvious examples are Black Friday or Valentines Day for E-commerce companies, but there might also be important, less obvious holidays for your niche.
If you’re working with a team of writers or marketers and want to use a centrally organized calendar, Hubspot has a helpful guide on setting one up with Google Calendar and Excel.
It’s important to publish in a consistent fashion so that your readers and writers alike know what to expect. You’ll also want to publish frequently enough to stay at the top of your customer’s mind.
Step 7. Promote!
After your content is published, make sure you get the most out of it by promoting it to your audience. Make sure to let your subscribers know about new resources on social media or in a weekly newsletter.
But don’t stop there. Reach out to influencers and other brands in your space and share it with them. If they think it would be valuable to their readers, they might share it on Twitter or link to it on their site – helping you reach a new audience.
Don’t be pushy or spammy though. Make sure you share your content as a helpful resource and avoid flat out asking people for a retweet or backlink without a compelling reason. That won’t do much but earn you a bad reputation.
Step 8. Revisit and Leverage Content
As your content library grows, you can start to revisit old pieces and milk them for more value to really boost your ROI. By putting in a little extra work you can boost the search ranking of your existing content and help keep it relevant rather than creating something new from scratch
As a bonus, you can now justify re-promoting it to your audience!
You should get creative, but here are a few ideas…
A) Expand existing content
Identify your most popular and useful blog posts and update them with an extra 1,000 words of content. Updating the article to be even better and earning it a boost in search ranking.
B) Create downloadable versions of guides.
Check Google Analytics and see which posts are attracting the most visitors to your site, then tidy up the formatting and turn it into a PDF download you can use a gated content upgrade.
C) Create an eBook.
Similar to the idea above, take a series of posts and combine them together to publish a comprehensive eBook on a topic you’ve already covered extensively and promote that!
You can even offer it on Amazon as a lead magnet to draw shoppers to your website or brand.
D) Turn Written Content Into Visual Content (and vice-versa)
Take one of your best blog posts and turn it into a video or infographic to boost its shareability and value.
If you don’t have someone on the team equipped to bring your words to life, consider heading over to Fiverr or Upwork and hire an animator or designer. Your existing content can easily serve as a blueprint for them, so you won’t have to worry about industry experience or explaining to them what you are hoping to create.
Conclusion
Content marketing is full of possibilities and benefit for your business. That’s why an entire industry has evolved around it, with dedicated blogs, companies, and even top executive level positions.
But the important thing is you get started. As you create content and receive feedback from readers, you’ll quickly refine your process. So just get publishing and solicit feedback.
It’s important to monitor results so you know what’s working, but you should have realistic expectations and don’t expect too much for the first 3-4 months as your content starts gaining traction among readers and search engines.