Successful Content Marketing
“Do you want to take your content marketing to a new level and really get started in 2020? Content marketing is means of choice to turn users into loyal customers. But it doesn’t always help a lot. What really matters in content marketing and what the last few years have taught us. “
If you think that content is based on a collection of blogs, Tweets and web pages that works in conjunction with a businesses’ goals, you’re right; but only partly. While social outreach, branding, and quality content are important elements of content management, in the grand scheme of things, there’s much more to it. But content marketing has been around far longer than the Internet. Why? Because content marketing is all about storytelling, and humans have told stories for as long as they could speak, but attention will always go to those who tell great stories.
What is use of your content marketing to you if nobody cares? Since the discipline became the buzzword in the marketing industry, the web has been flooded with content marketing. For many, it is less about the added value that is to be generated for the consumer, than about surfing a wave that turns out to be bigger and more difficult to master than assumed. In the past and still today, this has resulted in bad content that is of no use to anyone. In addition, what worked yesterday no longer has to work today. A look back at the developments in content marketing over the last few years and the lessons we can learn from them.
Content is king. Still. Or even more than ever. This is precisely why you should pay special attention to this field and always stay up to date. Content marketing is at the heart of most successful digital marketing campaigns. Behind every great brand is a wealth of valuable and relevant content that really connects with the company’s audience.
Content marketing is basically a simple term. It consists of two equally simple words — “content” and “marketing”. Content is texts, images and videos in all possible multimedia forms. Simply put marketing is about taking this content and successfully making it available to the internet world. It looks so easy at first glance actually requires a sophisticated strategy. Not all roads lead to the goal, however, some turn out to be dead ends.
How’s that for using content to market a product? A lot has changed since then, and what worked back in the 80s won’t necessarily work today. However, with new marketing channels like social media popping up almost daily, opportunity is knocking.
Need an example? Voice assistants are on the rise. Over 30% percent of the population already use Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. The trend is towards written content being output via voice requests. Directly within a search engine. If you want your content to be at the top of search results through voice search, you need to make a few adjustments. It means that content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses 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. Eventually, when customers make a purchase decision, their loyalty already lies with you. They will purchase your product and prefer it over competitors’ options. In contrast to one-off advertising, content marketing shows that you actually care about your customers.
Content marketing is an effective instrument in congress management for positioning, customer acquisition and retention. In comparison to classic congress marketing, the focus is not on communicating the pure congress facts. Rather, it is about the brand-related placement of your own content at the congress in order to win and retain customers.
Understand the Content Marketing
Not every text on the Internet has to be like a scientific analysis. In many subject areas, however, it is worthwhile to prove the added value of the statements made in a factual and objective manner. Studies are ideal for this, some of which are made available as freely linkable documents by large research centers and educational institutions. It does not necessarily have to be the entire study; links or quoting individual excerpts also give your content greater value. The sales funnel is essentially a broad-based term that describes the buyer’s decision-making journey, with the three key phases being awareness, evaluation, and purchase. Anyone involved in sales and marketing needs to pay close attention to this process in order to gain a better understanding of what makes buyers move through the funnel. But a great content strategist or manager will understand how to engage customers through every part of the funnel and ideally keep them cycling through the funnel.
Repurpose
As you consider distribution, you’ll want to bear in mind the different purposes that different types of content have and how this can affect your marketing and how you can use various combinations of content to save time and resources. You may want to consider, for example, establishing authority via guest blogging, composing blogs in tandem with email series, and using social media to build tribes and groups. The principle of guest articles does not necessarily have to be based on reciprocity, but the article writer will want a certain benefit. Perhaps you will take a few euros into your hand to convince a well-known person in your industry and write an article for you. The benefits of guest articles arise on several levels and include, for example:
- additional linking by the author of the guest article
- higher relevance of your own website in terms of external impact
- Content added value through new perspectives of the guest author
- Impression of serious and thematically diverse reporting
Target Audience
For any piece of content to be successful, it has to be personalized and speak to a specific person (a potential buyer), with a specific need, at a specific point in his or her buyer journey. Put another way, you have to have targeted content that reflects a deep understanding of who your audience and where they are on their way down the path to purchase. Audience is the second step in building a successful content marketing strategy. Many businesses believe that their audience is everyone. While that may be the case, you still need to segment your audience based on their likes and dislikes, their demographics, their spending habits, and so on. In order to create this content, you need to first identify your audience, because without an audience you won’t be able to decide what is useful for them.
Let’s say you’re selling coffee, your target audience might be school and college students who need to stay up to finish their studies and projects. Your audience can also be 80+-year-old grandparents who like to drink in the garden at noon. See how these two groups want the same thing but are decades apart? Also, keep an eye on your competitors, what are they doing and who are they targeting?
Good content marketing stands and falls with professionalism and the right decisions
Content marketing has become a crucial component of any marketing strategy today. Using content, marketers can generate sales, attract customers to their website and create a positive brand image. It is part of an inbound marketing strategy by filling the Internet with interesting information that people find via search engines. With a good content marketing strategy you can create opportunities to attract, engage and retain new customers. The framework offered here provides a checklist for thinking about how you approach your content marketing strategy.
However, any successful content marketing campaign today can hardly ignore the online part. Because storytelling has changed over the years, the attention of people stretches to more places than a few years ago, and marketers have to make sure that they tell stories in the year we actually live in.
