Everything About Content Marketing: types of content, strategy creation, performance indicators

Content marketing is a popular tool for attracting and communicating with customers. Young brands believe that content marketing is about publishing articles on a company’s blog and optimizing a site in search results, but that’s not all.

What is content marketing, how to implement it in a business, and why not all brands use such an “effective” tool – in our article.

What is called content marketing?

Content marketing is a tool for attracting new customers and communicating with them through the distribution of useful content.

This is not a mindless posting of publicly available material. Content marketing works when you create unique and expert content for your business niche. In practice, it looks like this: a user searches for information on the Internet, gets on the material of your blog, uses it to solve “pains”, subscribes to the newsletter, begins to trust the brand, and becomes a client. With the right implementation of content marketing in your business, you will get:

• additional audience;
• brand promotion;
• user trust;
• attracting traffic to the site;
• increasing sales.

How should the content be prepared?

Content marketing does not dictate the rules for submitting useful material. It can be distributed in any format: write cool cases, articles, and news, draw infographics, publish reports and polls, record podcasts and video tutorials. The main thing is that clients receive useful material.

Content can be divided into news, useful (for business development), and entertainment.

Stages of introducing a content strategy into a business

The content strategy includes all the nuances about materials, dates, and sites for publications for a certain period (most often a month).

Target audience analysis

If you do not know for whom the content is useful (and whether it is useful at all), do not proceed to the next steps. Determine who your client is, what resources he uses, what “pains” you solve with the help of content. It is advisable to analyze competitors in your niche.

Content plan creation

A content plan is a document in which all the details are described: when there will be publications, on what topics, in what format, on what sites. If you are writing SEO copy, include key phrases in your content plan for preparing each topic. The content plan allows you to avoid chaos in the preparation and posting of materials.

Content marketing is the systematic distribution of materials. Often, young brands believe that content marketing is not fruitful and useless. The secret is that the method of attracting customers through useful materials does not work immediately: traffic on the site and sales begin to grow in at least 5 months, and if you publish unnecessary content, it will not bring results at all.

How to choose themes for your content plan

You can identify topics of interest to users using Google Trends. You can also analyze major search queries using one of the SEO services.

Let’s look at the example of the Serpstat service:

1. We write a key phrase on the site (for example, “building a sales department”).
2. Choose a country and a search engine (Ukraine, Google.com), click “Search”.
3. We get an analysis of the frequency of requests by clusters.

Now you know which keywords are the most popular in your niche. Based on this data, create topics for writing articles, recording podcasts, video tutorials, or how-tos. For example, if the highest-frequency query is “building a sales department from scratch”, you can write a detailed step-by-step instruction “How to build an effective sales department from scratch”.

Selection of specialists

The first two points can be done independently, but further, without a team of specialists, it will be difficult. Imagine that you are staging a play: you need to distribute roles for all the actors, evaluate their preparation and the picture as a whole.

A marketer, editor, designer, and SMM specialist take a mandatory part in creating a content plan. Each of them is responsible for the quality of the final result: the marketer analyzes and selects ideas for publications, the editor controls the quality and expertise of the copywriter’s texts, the designer works on the visual component of the posts (creates diagrams, infographics, banners), the same specialist chooses the publication time, seeding methods content and interaction with the audience.

It is better to involve copywriters who know the topic: they will write material faster and better than those who will understand the topic from scratch. If you plan to publish frequently, you can involve several authors to speed up the processes.

The systematic posting

Content marketing is not a trivial posting of articles on a website. We recommend publishing content on your website, social networks, and other external resources (even on a paid basis), and creating email newsletters.

Organics do not provide a large reach of posts, so use targeted ads to promote your content, otherwise, it will go unnoticed.

Posting should not be chaotic, but systematic. You can use the auto-posting services to make this easier.

How to check the effectiveness of your content strategy?

Some people think that the effectiveness of a content strategy is foolish to measure because it is not a quantitative but a qualitative tool. You can still measure the effectiveness using metrics of reach, user activity, the number of article views, traffic to the site, and sales.

Use data from Google Analytics and Facebook ad cabinets. Most organic views and interactions will be in the first 2-3 days, and then everything depends on the work of the targetologist and the SMM manager (seeding materials in different communities). Pay attention to social metrics – likes, reposts, comments.

Why content marketing doesn’t work? 

The reasons are different. The first is the misuse of content marketing. If you need sales, registrations, and customer contacts – use landing pages, contextual and targeted advertising.

The second reason is the chaotic “throwing” of content into the network. Content marketing does not bring results quickly: you will have to systematically share content and not receive feedback for a long time. Therefore, all brands know about content marketing, but do not use it to promote their business.