What is Content Marketing : Process, Strategy, Planning Complete Guide

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In last few years, Content marketing specifically gained a lot of popularity but I have seen a majority of the people don’t really understand what content marketing is. Or they just think is content marketing is a different kind of advertisement. But content marketing quite different from the traditional  form of marketing .Like I have already seen a video is on Facebook ads and Google ads in the paid media channel is directly showing your advertisement towards your target customers and then you driving those people on your landing pages and to your web pages   where you are selling them something. But when it comes to content marketing the process is slightly different instead of directly driving the customers to your products then first provides value and rather a lot of value of a customer.

What is Content Marketing :

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable , relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience- and , ultimately ,to drive profitable customer action . Like any other marketing strategy you need to be relevant to the audience.

For example, let’s say you are selling guitar. But if you are showing an advertisement and if you are showing your content to an audience those more interested in cat food or like yoga then definitely no one buy your product. So your content needs to be relevant, it needs to be valuable, and quality of content is really high. And most important it needs to be consistent. The attention span of people decreasing year by year because of so many distraction like mobile , with telephone , with tablets and laptops and continues notification . its very hard to keep the attention of a customers or rather a prospective customers. So will have to produce high quality content that is relevant and that to be consistent base so that customers can create a bond with your content or rather a bond with your business or with you if you are an independent influencer.

 

Types of Content :

 

  • Blog articles
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Emails
  • Webinars
  • Infographics
  • Cartoons
  • Quizzes
  • Generators/Calculators
  • Assessments
  • Apps
  • Case studies/White papers
  • Interviews
  • Announcement/News
  • Checklist/Worksheets
  • Reviews/Comparison
  • Stories
  • Ultimate guides
  • Book

 

Why Content Marketing for business:

  1. Increased Sales
  2. Cost savings (because we are not focusing on PPC)
  3. Better customers who have more loyalty

Stage Process of content marketing:

 

Planning:

First, you have to plan and you have to select what kind of content to write and research about it , resources and all. Secondly,is to publish to content and third is the marketing and promotion of the content.

  • Make an Editorial Calendar –(Asana :it is an advanced project management tool but if you want something free then you go for Trello )
  • See what your competitors are doing- ( Ahrefs / Moz /Buzzsumo)
  • Catch the trends
  • Create content
  • Engage with your audience
  • Promote your content
  • Track and Analyse Data

Writing and creating successful content:

  • Your writing style will directly affect the impact on your audience .(use proper formatting ,write smaller sentences etc.)
  • Content length: Blog post length , social post length
  • Headline is extremely crucial. (use tools like Coschedule headline optimizer to create amazing headlines.
  • Use Canva.com to create beautiful and powerful images for your content.
  • Outsourcing content creating process on iwriter, textbroker etc.
  • Best tip: Use tools and reverse engineer what works

Pre-promotion:

  • Don’t take this step lightly. Pre-Promotion can make drastic difference.
  • Finding promotion partners
  • Email outreach will be your savior( your email should be customized, your email should be clear and follow up is the key to shoot up your reply rate)

Types of Traffic:

  • Organic traffic
  • Direct Traffic
  • Paid Traffic
  • Email Marketing Traffic
  • Social Media Traffic
  • Referral Traffic

Promotion & Outreach – Social Media Traffic:

  • Using it successfully.
  1. Sharing more that once – Scheduling
  2. Alert people you mention
  3. Take it easy on hashtags .
  • Paid promotion for your content.
  1. Promote on networks your audience is using. Boosting is good way to reach majority of your social media audience
  2. Target, test and rotate your ads.

Promote & Outreach – Organic Traffic:

  • Follow all the tactics of on-page SEO and off-page SEO in order to get your article ranked.
  1. Keyword research before writing your content.
  2. Write engaging content.
  3. Build links to the article to get your article ranked on search engine.

Promote & Outreach – Email Marketing Traffic:

  • Email Marketing traffic is, as its name states, traffic that lands on your website via links contained in the marketing emails that you send out.
  • Contacting influencers with outreach emails.
  • Build a traction list

Repurposing your Content:

  • Creating evergreen content
  • How to repurpose
  1. Guest post
  2. Email courses
  3. Ebooks
  4. Creating videos
  5. Powerpoint presentations
  • Is duplicate content bad?