What is content marketing?
Content marketing is the activity of creating and sharing valuable, consistent and engaging content in order to gain and maintain the interest of a specific target audience. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to persuade the audience to take a specific action that is beneficial to the creator.
Content marketing thus goes far beyond mere content creation, which has long been about more than just writing or making videos.
It is extremely important to realize that advertising a product or service is not part of content marketing. Content marketing operates at a slightly earlier stage – it provides knowledge, information and, above all, it is oriented to help solve users’ problems, rather than direct sales.
What do you need content marketing for?
It is worth realizing right away that content is not a separate entity, but a component of many types of marketing. These include email marketing, social media marketing, public relations, SEO or PPC. None of these forms of promotion can work without properly tailored content.
Content marketing is a means of expression through which you can present your brand as helpful in solving problems. This is one way to build your brand and penetrate the consciousness of your audience – potential customers.
Reliable and useful content increases trust in your brand. Every person who – thanks to your hint – can deal with a troublesome issue or improve their work will gain trust.
Optimized content will also affect the results on the most popular search engines. The better the algorithm rates your content, the better the chance that it will make it to the first page of results and thus draw interested users to your website.
Finally, it is worthwhile to create content marketing if only because the vast majority of online companies are already doing it. So if you want to compete with them on a level playing field, implementing content marketing activities becomes a necessity.
What kind of content can you create as part of your content marketing strategy?
We write a lot about content creation, but so far we haven’t talked much about how to do it. Let’s start by saying that there are plenty of ways to build content – starting with blogging, followed by YouTube videos and even memes (though these are certainly not all the possibilities).
Here are examples of the types of content you can create for your company.
Texts
- blog posts,
- e-books,
- case studies,
- checklists,
- tutorials,
- newsletters,
- industry reports.
Graphics
- infographics,
- memes.
Video content
- YouTube videos,
- video podcasts,
- Rolls on Instagram/Facebook,
- short video on TikTok.
Audio content
- podcasts,
- audiobooks.
These are only the most popular options. However, you already have the assurance that content can be written and recorded virtually anywhere and in hundreds of ways. The open – and very important – question remains: how do you make the content you create highly effective?
How to create effective content marketing?
Users – your potential customers – have specific expectations and needs. Your job is to respond to them with the content you create. This is one of those things that is easy to talk about, but hard to implement. That’s because content marketing requires a bit of preparation – it’s not enough to just sit down in front of a computer and start writing. What do you need to create effective content?
1. Identify your target audience
You need to know who you are targeting with your message, so start by concretizing your target audience. You can do this in a variety of ways (preferably a combination of all or some of them):
- Look at your current customers – if you already have a base of regular customers, analyze their behavior and observe what they buy and what they are looking for. If your customer base is large enough, you can try segmenting them – after all, they don’t all have to like the same things.
- Take a look at the reviews left by customers – what do they point out in them? What did they particularly like, what were they not satisfied with?
- Talk to customer service – find out what users are coming in with – what are they looking for and what are they paying attention to?
- Analyze statistical data from the tools you use – Google, Facebook, Instagram, CRM tools: each of them has built-in analytics that allow you to learn a lot of interesting things about your target audience. Find out who is already the audience of your content and products.
- Ask yourself who you want to see in your target audience – although your expectations may be out of line with reality, it’s worth defining them and seeing to what extent they coincide. This question will also come in handy if you’re just starting out and don’t have any customers yet.
2. Create a persona
All the information you gathered in the previous step will be useful to you in the process of creating a customer persona. What is such a persona? It’s a customer profile of your brand, built on the basis of available data. All the information you have about the people using your services or products will come in handy. Based on specific data, you will get a real picture of your brand’s customer.
The marketing persona should be defined by demographics (age, gender, size of place of residence, education, family situation), but you should also describe their occupation, the industry they work in, characteristics, ambitions, values, behaviors. The last, extremely important, element is to indicate the problems that the persona faces, At this point it is worth reminding that you create a persona in order to be able to target valuable content, that is, content that helps solve problems.
If you feel that one persona does not exhaust the subject, create several. Keep in mind, however, that they should correspond to reality, and not represent an idea of who your store’s customer should be.
3. Choose topics that are of interest to the audience and carry value
The role of content – paradoxically – is not to promote your brand, because that brings no value to your audience. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if, when looking for an answer to a question you have, you would be happy to see an ad?
Instead of advertising yourself, focus on building trust by providing valuable content – content that will actually help your customers. Be an expert for them, one who knows his or her stuff and can present knowledge in an appealing way.
How do you find those topics that will interest users?
Recall your conversations with vendors and customer service. What topics did customers bring up? What did they ask about? Based on the answers, construct a list of topics. They will come in handy as you plan your content marketing strategy.
Think about key phrases – words and phrases that are most relevant to the topic. Here’s an example: the key phrase for the text you just read is “effective content marketing.” There can be more phrases, of course, but it’s not worth overdoing it. Remember that they are meant to help you position your content – so that it will rank high in search results (e.g. Google).
All ready to go? Not quite – content marketing should be created based on data, and even if you choose topics that often come up in your teams’ conversations with customers, it doesn’t mean that they are very popular. It is therefore necessary to use SEO tools. With them, you will verify whether the chosen keywords are popular enough to make it worth creating content about them.
4. Create valuable content
Now you can see how much preparation is needed before it’s time to prepare the content properly. However, with information on your target audience, one or more personas and a list of high-potential topics in hand, you can proceed to choosing a target platform and finally creating.
Choosing the right platform for your content is of paramount importance – if the people in your target audience are largely entrepreneurs – LinkedIn or Facebook users, they will be reached by a different type of content than representatives of generation Z, who are more likely to use TikTok or Instagram. Content distribution will also look different depending on the platform you choose.
The form of the message can, of course, be combined – for example, publish long tutorial videos on YouTube, and from their fragments create so-called shorts, i.e. short clips that can be successfully presented in instagram rolls or on Facebook.
The written word is still very popular. Reliable, topic-comprehensive guide articles have a good chance of attracting quality traffic to a website thanks to the fact that – properly optimized – they can land at the top of the results in Google and other search engines.
Remember that – for your content marketing to have the expected effect – it is necessary to develop and adopt a strategy. Writing or recording content ad hoc cannot bring the expected results. Even if you hit a so-called “golden shot,” i.e. an article or video will reach an unexpectedly large audience, without a strategic approach it is extremely easy to miss the opportunity that content provides.
5. Optimize content for SEO, but not only
Optimization is one of the most essential elements of content marketing – this is especially true for written content, but – although to a lesser extent – also for audio or video. In text, it is necessary to use keywords, headings, add titles and attributes to graphics or make a meta description (a short description that will show up in search engines).
In a film, its duration can make a big difference, but so can its quality, framing or editing.
In audio content, the use of good recording equipment and proper audio processing is an absolute necessity. Recipients of podcasts or broadcasts engage only the sense of hearing – so everything should be done to make the audio content sound perfect.
Both video and audio content must also be properly described – for example, with a title and tags. The more time you spend on this step, the greater the chance that your content will find an audience.
6. Analyze the results of content marketing
The final element of creating effective content is – again – using data, but in a different way. Online marketing efforts are often not final – it’s not print, where it’s impossible to make corrections after release. Content on your blog, YouTube channel, website or Facebook profile can be edited freely. Exercise this right, but don’t just do it. Here are some tips to make your content even more effective:
- Check what results your content is achieving,
- Test different types of content, for example, through A/B testing,
- Conduct analysis and compare the effectiveness of activities,
- Make ongoing improvements to content that has a chance to last a long time (blog posts, YouTube videos), but don’t waste time tweaking social media posts – their lifespan is severely limited,
- Re-analyze the results and check whether the changes made gave the expected result,
- Keep trying.
Summary
Effective content marketing is an outgrowth of high-quality content that hits fertile ground and helps your audience solve problems. This is how you build brand image and ensure positive brand perception. Remember to base your content creation on data and a clearly defined strategy – this way you maximize the chance of success. Don’t stop at one type of content – support many or all areas of your company’s online marketing efforts this way.
