Editor’s note: Not everyone is an expert. And even experienced writers can do with a simple, yet comprehensive guide on subjects they are familiar with. This guide to essential aspects of content marketing will be particularly helpful to those starting out but may be worth a read for others also.

Essential Aspects of Content Marketing

Content creation is a quintessential marketing strategy that impacts every aspect of brand identity. Reports show that over 90% of marketers use digital content to approach their customers. However, more than 60% of professionals in this field still don’t have a clearly defined plan of action.

Building a content marketing strategy is challenging because you need to take into account a wide range of components and coordinate them to ensure flawless implementation. Before you go into details and begin crafting content, you need to understand the fundamentals.

This post will present you with the essential features of content marketing:

1. Research Is Key

You shouldn’t even think about creating content without conducting thorough research. It’s important to identify the audience and build a profile of a typical customer. You need to find out the following:

• Age and gender: These are the basic characteristics of your target consumers.
• Location: You also need to see where they come from.
• Education and income level: Are you targeting highly educated and well-off clients or younger consumers with weaker purchasing capabilities?
• Lifestyle: How they live and where they like to hang out?

Answers to these research questions will give you enough data to build a customer profile so that you can think about the corresponding content strategy.

You may also want to read: How Content Intelligence Can Empower Your Business [Infographic]

2. Define Business Goals

The second tip is to define business goals before taking any major steps. Why is this so important? Well, marketing content is never random, and you don’t want to publish posts just to indulge your audience.

On the contrary, each post comes with a call to action (CTA) in mind because you want to encourage content consumers to act upon reading. Content marketing is only a tool that you use to help prospects move further down the sales funnel.

In such circumstances, it’s not the same whether you want to raise brand awareness, generate new leads, or drive conversions. Each of these objectives demands a different type of content.

3. Make a Calendar of Activities

Now that you’ve got the essentials covered, it’s time to make a plan of publishing. You need to create a calendar of activities in order to ensure marketing consistency throughout the whole year.

This feature is critical because it brings you two sorts of benefits. Not least, it helps the marketing team manage time, while it also inspires prospects to keep following you and anticipating future posts.

There are all sorts of scheduling apps available online, but Google Calendar is probably the simplest solution. It has a simple and intuitive interface where you can set reminders, write down tasks, add events, and all other details relevant to your business.

You may also want to read: 5 Ways to Reboot Your Brand’s Content Marketing Strategy

4. Create Top-Level Content

Finally, it is time to discuss the critical segment of your strategy. Everybody creates content these days, so you have to make sure to craft top-level posts and outperform the biggest competitors. How can you do that? There is no one answer to this question, and we need to give you several inputs:

• Keep it informative: You need to educate the audience by covering all aspects of your topics.
• Solve problems: Most people consume content because they want to solve a practical problem. Your job is to help them deal with everyday issues.
• Don’t be pushy: While the ultimate goal is to sell products or services, you can’t achieve it by being too pushy. Use the 80/20 percent formula, crafting 80% of informative content and adding only 20% of salesy messages.

5. Publish Multimedia Content

We are not done with content creation yet because it’s necessary to emphasize the importance of adding multimedia elements to your posts. Most people love to see a nice image or video, so you definitely need to consider using such content as well.

You can exploit all sorts of files, from podcasts and infographics to videos and graphs. For instance, see how Backlinko (one of the most popular marketing blogs globally) adds a plethora of multimedia components to make articles more attractive and educational.

You may also want to read: How to Use Visuals in Your Content Marketing Strategy

6. Don’t Forget Engagement

Content creation is fundamental, but don’t think the game is over once the post goes live. On the contrary, now you need to follow audience reactions and engage in communication with the most engaged followers. Make sure to ask them questions, answer their inquiries, and encourage people to write comments.

This tactic goes beyond regular article follow-ups as you can keep the audience engaged using many other techniques. For instance, Resumesplanet prefers creating surveys to give users the possibility to make decisions or express opinions. They use tools such as Survey Monkey to design opinion polls within minutes. It proves to be an excellent engagement model for this company.

7. Choose the Right Social Media Channels

A decent content marketing strategy would be unimaginable without social media. With over two billion daily active users, social platforms give you the chance to approach the target audience very quickly. But that doesn’t mean you have to use every single network.

We believe that small and medium-sized marketing teams should focus on three or four platforms only, depending on the preferences of their prospects. After all, why would you waste time on LinkedIn if your audience only frequents Instagram and Facebook? Having said that, let’s go through major social media:

• Facebook: The most popular network is a must for all brands.
• Instagram: The fastest-growing platform is ideal for product-focused companies with younger audiences.
• YouTube: This video-sharing channel is irreplaceable if you want to publish testimonials, product reviews, and live videos.
• LinkedIn: If you are into B2B niche, this might well be the best option for you.
• Twitter: It is good for targeting young and middle-aged professionals.

You may also want to read: Three DIY SEO Tools for Your Content Marketing Strategy

8. Local Marketing

In case you are running a traditional store or a restaurant, location-based marketing is the right way to go. Tons of users search for “near me” places every minute, so you need to allow them to find your business effortlessly.

The easiest way to do that is by creating a Google My Business account with all the latest information about your company (address, phone numbers, etc.). Besides that, you should try to publish content relevant to the local audiences and optimize a website for mobile searches.

9. Use Digital Tools

Maintaining the highest level of productivity is almost impossible if you don’t use digital tools. There’s a whole bunch of apps and plugins that can help you become a better and more efficient content creator, but we will mention only a few of them:

• EssayWritingLand: It’s a professional writing agency with dozens of highly skilled authors. You could also contact us here at Curatti to see if we can help with your needs!
• Headline analyzer: CoSchedule developed a title analyzer to assist writers in finding the most interesting headlines for their articles.
• Careersbooster: If you need to hire a new marketer, you can consult with Careers Booster.
• Grammarly: This is the most frequently-used proofreading and editing plugin worldwide.
• Pixabay: A perfect solution if you need a free library of quality images.

You may also want to read: 5 Steps to Writing Effective Social Media Content

10. Analytics

The last but definitely not the least important piece of advice is to measure the results of your content creation efforts. As always, you can find many tools to help you understand content performance, but Google Analytics remains an anchor in this field. Using this tool, you will be able to monitor all of the major KPIs, including time spent on page, bounce rates, acquisitions, and many more.

Conclusion

Creating quality content for your website and social media is not productive if you don’t define a strategy that guides the entire marketing team through the process. This is why it’s crucial to learn everything about content marketing basics and use the knowledge to design a content creation plan.

We showed you how to do it with these 10 essential elements of content marketing. We hope this article can help you find the most appropriate strategy for your brand but feel free to write a comment if you need any other explanations – we will be glad to help you out!

 

 

Mark Delarika is a professional content writer and teacher, successful entrepreneur, and blogger. He is familiar with a wide range of spheres concerning running his own business and education. Mark taught in more than 10 countries all over the world. He is a business writer at US Projector. He helps students and businessmen to improve their writing skills, shares his personal experience, and gives practical tips. You can tweet him @DelarikaMark

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