If you have a business and want to market your business online, you can never escape hearing about “content marketing” at this point. Everywhere you look, listen, and read, content marketing is a sure topic that will come up, when it comes to online marketing.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is the creating and sharing of valuable free content, to attract and allure potential customers and invite repeat buyers. Content marketing refers to the type of content you share, and how closely related it is to what you actually sell. In other words, content marketing is basically the process of introducing, educating, and inviting people to like, trust and engage in business with you.
The key components found in all top-performing digital content marketing strategies include:
Goals
A plan is not a plan without a goal, and that is no different when it comes to business strategy. According to Fast Company, having a goal gives your strategy a direction which can help motivate your team, facilitate planning, and allow you to see and evaluate performance. Having goals in place will give you guidance in times when big decisions are to be made. In case you fail at some aspects in business and don’t know where to continue, all you have to do is look at your goals and see the next big step in order to achieve it.
Key performance indicators (KPIs)
If you’ve never heard of KPIs, no problem! Key Performance Indicators measure what’s going on with your brand’s digital content marketing. According to Pardot, KPIs enable you to see which tactics work, and which don’t. KPIs used in content marketing includes but not limited to page visitors, time spent on the page or with the content, number of social shares, number of leads generated, and number of comments or other engagements.
Buyer personas
One of the most important thing to understand about online marketing, is for you digital content marketing to work, you need to first identify who you’re talking to and why you’re talking to them. No digital content marketing is ever complete and effective without the consideration of buyer personas. It helps to identify the concerns and needs of your customers, and the challenges they are facing, and how your brand can be the solution.
Content plan
Although a digital content marketing strategy is different from content strategy, having a plan or strategy for the content your brand offers should be one of the aspects your overall content marketing strategy. Always be thinking creatively about the type of content you’ll make, the topics you’ll tackle, and where you can publish your content.
5. Content software
Content marketing software comes in variety of forms. There are myriad of content marketing software available in the market right now, and choosing what’s best for your brand is very important. Make sure that the content marketing software you choose is exactly what your brand needs, whether it be a content management system to create and publish blog posts, videos, or other types of content.
