Our A to Z of content marketing helps you get a handle on one of the most important aspects of digital marketing - find out each day what you should be paying close attention to.
Content marketing is becoming increasingly important. It has such a broad effect, from boosting your SEO rankings to helping generate warm leads for sales to jump on, but the concept of content marketing is still relatively new.
There’s a lot to get to grips with when it comes to content marketing, from SEO best practice to whether you should jump on the viral bandwagon. With all this in mind we’ve created a content marketing A to Z to give you a run through of the terminology and what you should be looking to implement.
A is for:
Audience
If you don’t know who your content marketing is aimed at, you can’t create an effective strategy. Items like Buyer Personas will give you an insight into this as well, but the key thing to know is what your audience is looking for. Whether it’s an answer to an issue they’ve been having or tips on which product to buy, they won’t come to you for answers if you’re not providing the relevant content.
Authenticity
This is tied in with Audience, just as you have to understand what your customers are looking for, similarly you have to be able to provide the right information.
Writing about the intricate details of engine maintenance is tricky when you don’t know where begin, and if the audience suspects that you don’t know what you’re talking about then they won’t trust you. Without that trust your Engagement
will be non-existent and all your readers will be exiting at the top of the funnel.
B is for
Blog
You’re reading one. Doesn’t that mean something? Content marketing without a blog is like a car without an engine. It just doesn’t function effectively.
For most digital natives, the blog combines the text, the mag, the brochure, and the manual in one. It’s the ultimate destination for your programs, makes people want to come back for more and gives you the hook to build a great database of would-be customers.
When you’re blogging though, never forget your Brand.
Brand
Your brand is your lifeblood. WIthout it, no one knows who you are and can be reminded of that fact when the time comes. You can be as far reaching or specialized in your branding as you like and your approach to branding may be the impetus that makes or breaks your work.
Buyer Personas
The genuine buyers who take decisions about the products or services you market. Knowing what their primary goals and pain points are will help you create content that’s on the topics and issues that your Audience actually faces, rather than what you think they’re worried about.
As well as this you’ll know which content you need to create to drive potential customers further down the Funnel and get
them to convert.
Buying Cycle
Without knowing your buying cycle you don’t know how long your campaigns should be, and you won’t be able to do any predictions on what results you’ll be getting (which means that reporting on how close you are to hitting your targets can be a nightmare). The basic phases of a buying cycle are:
Awareness – when your product/service comes to the attention of your customers.
Consideration – when a customer starts considering how your project, or your competitors will affect them.
Purchase
but once you’ve got more data on your potential customers and how they’re converting you’ll be able to put together a more detailed buying cycle.
C is for
Conversions
Converting site visitors into paying customers is the challenge for many markets, literally “converting” users into a form of revenue. Without tracking this you won’t be able to know how your content is performing, or which is the most effective.
Community
Your community forms an important part of your Distribution. This encompasses your Social Footprint and your Newsletter, and remember that they’re also great for input on the topics and trends that they’re facing. Your Buyer Personas are meant to be a living document that’s constantly updated, not something that’s just created and left to gather dust. A good content creation process is cyclical, with the feedback on the content you create feeding back into the pieces you’ll make in the future.
Customer
Lest we forget why we’re doing this. We want to love the customers we have, and make them love us back, and we want to ensure that we get some new ones along the way. So if you could say one thing about your content marketing programs, it’s that if they’re more about you and less about the customer then they’re not going to work. No further discussion needed.
Curation
Finding, sorting, and sharing relevant digital content on a specific topic for a target market. Important when considering how you want to target your consumers. This will come into play when you’re looking at your social channels, where you can show that you not only create the best content around, you’re able to recognize it when others create it as well. This will also play into your Blogger Outreach strategy.
D is for
Data Capture
This goes beyond just grabbing their email so that you can send them your Newsletter. If you have an effective data capture tool on your website then you can profile your customers and create information rich Buyer Personas, leading to targeted, effective content. Sign ups are the most popular form of data capture, whether it’s to a newsletter or a Webinar, but you can also ask users to deposit information in exchange for downloads such as eBooks or Whitepapers.
Design
Being visually appealing is incredibly important in a world where users are bombarded with wonderful images and designs every day, through exposure to the web. A great design can make your business or organisation stand out on the web, and that’s critical in today’s world. This should encompass all the aspects of your content, whether it’s your blogs readability, or the layout of your downloads.
Distribution
The system of making a product or service available to both consumers and business users. The ultimate outcome of your marketing strategy will be determined by the impact you make with your distribution. You can be creating the best content in the world and without an effective distribution channel no-one will read it. This incorporates SEO, EarnedMedia, Newsletters, Social, plus the many other channels that are available. Research and find the right ones for your company.
E is for
Email marketing may have its ups and downs, but underpinning almost every content strategy is the email address. It’s still an important part of digital advertising today and one that shouldn’t be underestimated.
With the right strategy, you can avoid the much-dreaded spam folder. Marketing automation has reached the point where it’s a no-brainer for a company to have a well synchronised email campaign, and of course, your Newsletter is incredibly important.
Earned Media
In this world of social media and event based marketing, earned media is becoming a new source of publicity, being able to fuel the popularity or reach of a brand via promotional events and actions. How can you harness the power of earned media with your brand?
Editorial Calendar
A good Editorial Calendar will means that you can not only plan your content, but that you can see greater synchronicity across your channels. Your employees responsible for social media will be able to see what content is coming up and make the right plans and actions to ensure it gets the best pick up. For example, if you’re going to do a review of a new BMW that’s being launched soon then your team can reach out to BMW on Twitter beforehand, so that when you do tweet the piece of content they’re more likely to retweet it and boost your Distribution. It can be difficult to get so far ahead, but running about a month in advance will give you the foresight and flexibility you need to get the most out of your content.
Engagement
If customers are coming to your site and bouncing then you know you’ve got a problem. It doesn’t matter how good your content is if no-one is engaging with it. If you have this problem then it’s time to take a look at (or create) your Buyer Personas. If you have these in place properly then you’ll be able to capture potential customers’ interest and move them down the Funnel. Similarly, your Social analytics should track Engagement, as it doesn’t matter how many people “Like” your content if they’re not actually reading it properly.
eBooks
This ties in to Long Copy but a well produced eBook can be a fantastic marketing asset. It fits into the bottom of the Funnel for those customers who are on the brink of buying. The eBook is something can you can use to drive data collection (essential for your Buyer Personas) by offering to people signing up to your Newsletter in exchange for more info for example. As well as this, someone downloading an eBook represents a real interest in your product, particularly if you’ve chosen a good title, and means that you’ve got a good chance of converting them. If you do lead scoring then you can measure this more effectively and see whether the customer should be passed over to sales for follow up.
Come back tomorrow for more!
By Dorothy Mead, Chief Acquisition Officer at blur Group.
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