Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable content to attract and retain customers. As many forms of traditional or ‘outbound’ marketing become increasingly ineffective, content marketing is gaining popularity because high quality content can help increase trust in your brand and also attract traffic from search engines and social media.
The content itself can take any form – it could be written, visual, a video, or any other format that your audience may find interesting or helpful. And the really good news: if you create it yourself all it costs is your time!
Here’s how to get started with content marketing for your business…
1. Decide on your goals
In order to create an effective content marketing program, it’s important to consider your goals at the outset. This will help you plan and create content that achieves your business objectives. Ideally all the content you create should have a call to action that supports your goals.
2. Define your audience
Before diving into writing content it’s vital to define the audience you are writing for. There’s so much content on the internet now it’s no longer useful to create generic content, you need to create content for a niche audience that makes up the target for your company.
At the start of every content marketing project, we work with our clients to create customer personas to understand what content might work best for their particular audience.
3. Review your existing content
Do you know what content already exists on your website? Spending some time reviewing your existing content is helpful for two reasons. Firstly, it will identify any pages that are out of date or irrelevant, that need removing or updating. Secondly, by getting a better understanding of what you already have, you’ll be in a good position to spot any gaps or opportunities for new content.
4. Plan your content marketing calendar
Posting useful high quality content regularly is the key to success with content marketing. The easiest way to ensure you’re consistent with your content is to plan it out in a calendar. This will also ensure your website has a good balance of different types of content for each of the audiences you identified.
Luckily we’ve made this step easier for you by creating a template for you to use. Download our free content calendar to get started.
5. Distribute your content
Great content won’t help you if no one reads it. How will your audience find your content? Make sure your content gets read by promoting it through social media and email marketing.
6. Measure and refine
Once you’ve written and shared useful content the hard work doesn’t stop there. Measuring the success of your content will help you improve upon what you’ve done so far to make your content more relevant and useful to your target audience. Key things to look at are how often your content is being viewed, shared and commented on, as well as the conversion rate for your call to action.
Still not sure how to get started with content marketing?
Can’t face the task of creating content yourself or looking for more help with a content marketing strategy? Get in touch.
