7 Advanced Thoughts On Content Marketing
The dream of hordes of customers flocking to business blogs in search of educational content to supplement their buying decisions fuels the content economy. Powered by storytelling, eye-catching visual elements, and favorable statistics, content marketing is taking control of the digital marketing world.
Obviously, business goals can be achieved through content marketing, but it needs to be carefully planned, optimized and measured for return on investment. Content marketing will generate revenues and provide a positive return on investment if you follow strategies that will help you build up a good understanding of your audience and to produce strong content that is linked directly to your selling cycle.
The aim of building strategies for content marketing is to bring leads to your business by showcasing expertise or a solution that your business provides. The best way to develop your strategies is through knowledge of your target customers, how they use content and how your content can be matched to their persona.
1. Think Strategically and Respond Rapidly
Think about having a clear content strategy in place before any content is created and before planning how it will gain exposure through social media and other methods.
Your content strategy will be connected directly to your business goals. In developing a good content strategy, you will define what it is you want to achieve, the resources that are going to be required and exactly how the results can be calculated and measured.
Persuasion techniques come into play when you know what topics the content you use needs to cover. Then you can target your prospects and lead them towards a firm call to action.
2. Invest in Thorough Audience Analysis
Thoughts about content marketing should focus largely on your audience, so you can plan to produce content that is going to be effective for generating leads that will result in conversions.
Social media analytic tools will help you to identify where your target audience is based, their age range and demographic. The data supplied by analytics will define what type of content needs to be created. You can base your content on the topics that your audience in social media shows interest in and on the sort of sites they most like to visit.
Google Analytics lets you see which pages have the highest conversion rate and analyzes the flow of traffic to your blog or website.
The majority of your target audience could be found on Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook or another big social media site. Analysis of all available data on your audience will determine who you should be sharing your content with what social network they are most likely to use.
3. Attract New Audiences Based on Buyer Personas
The way you think about the precise audience you need to target can be defined by a marketing persona. 
Identifying this persona means that your content can be tailored for their specific interests. You can develop new channels by posting content that appeals most to them and which provides solutions to their problems.
The specific marketing persona of your audience will depend on your market sector or industry and the type of business or website you own.
Finding the key to this persona lies in looking at the analytics of your website to see where your visitors arrive from and what their motivation appears to be in viewing the content. This can be assessed by noting exactly what keywords were used in searches and how long visitors stayed on each page.
4. Plan Your Content to Supplement Sales Funnels
Think about how content marketing makes it easier to build sales funnels. A sales funnel is an established marketing system that provides the best route for a prospect to follow and become a lead, who then converts into a customer and eventually becomes a repeat buyer.
By building a sales funnel, you are not just blindly creating content. You are in control of how you bring in traffic and convert visitors into paying customers.
5. Continuously Develop Content Distribution Channels
Remember that the point of using content marketing is to have your content viewed online by the maximum number of relevant prospects. There is no point in producing content that only a few of them will see. Content distribution channels are therefore required to be set up.
Content distribution should be set up through your own media channels. These are the channels where you control content, such as your blog, your social network accounts, email newsletters and web pages.
Content can also be distributed through media used by people who share links or create content. This means that your marketing content can be distributed through social media, social bookmarking, product reviews, Internet forums and message boards, news sites and other media opportunities.
In addition to these free distribution channels, you can increase the amount of exposure your content gets through paid advertising.
Channels can be set up by paying for promotion in social networks, using pay-per-click advertising, buying social media ads and promoting through other types of advertising. In order to evaluate the ROI, it is necessary to be precise about the cost of using these as tools to distribute your content, so it can be viewed online by a greater number of people who fit in with your marketing persona.
6. Don’t Forget Repurposing and Content Syndication
In addition to using the most effective distribution channels, think about increasing the amount of exposure your content gets, by repurposing anything that can be used again.
Analytics of blog posts and web pages will show what titles are proving to be most popular. Those same titles can be then be used effectively in your content marketing. You can have them listed as related content on a blog or have them placed on multiple sites as recommend content.
If you want your content to reach a much wider target audience though, consider content syndication.
7. Revenue Calculations for Conversion Rates
By putting a lot of thought into your content marketing strategies, you can have a lot of content working for you 24 hours a day. The results need to be measured so that you can calculate future conversation rates and to plan on increasing revenues from those sources. This can only be done when you are able to calculate the amount of ROI that has already been attained.
Strategize Your Content Marketing Plan
Content marketing has to be based on a strong strategy that is carefully planned from start to finish. The amount of time and effort that goes into the preparation will never go to waste if your strategy is based on the right way of thinking about content marketing.
Content marketing can be a significant investment for every brand. If planned carefully, measured and optimized it can become a very good investment. If not, it can be a waste of money.
Originally titled “The Right Way to Think About Content Marketing” on MillennialCEO, and is republished here with permission.
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https://www.workzone.com/how-to-create-buyer-personas-basic-and-advanced-strategies/\
http://brightlove.org/Syndication.html
Ron Sela
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