What is Content Marketing?
According to Content Marketing Institute CMI,
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.
Content Marketing Institute
Though, we liked Marketing Expert Neil Patel’s simple definition:
Content marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong relationship with your target audience by giving them high-quality content that is very relevant to them on a consistent basis.
Neil Patel
The idea is to, when customers are ready to make any buying decision, they will already be loyal to your product and brand and most likely, prefer your product over your competitors.
Content marketing mostly has a long-term benefit over the short term.
- Saves Cost by reducing the constantly paid ad expenditure and buying more customer lead.
- Build Loyalty by providing useful and valuable information to the target market and future customer.
- Increase Sales by taking the customer from awareness > consideration > purchase > delighted journey.
Some of the content formats used in the real-life scenarios are:
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Content Strategy 101
Content marketing success relies on its content strategy framework. A content marketing strategy based on your marketing and sales objective keeps you align with your ultimate goals like traffic, audience engagement, and sales while finding the best way to keep your customers actively engaged with your content and brand.
Focus on the ultimate goal
You need to set your content marketing goal at the very first. It could be brand awareness, social sharing, and engagement or lead generation, and in-store sales.
Map out your customer persona
After finding out your ideal customer profile also known as a buyer or customer persona. It’s time to map out their interest and need.
- What interests them?
- What are their passionate about?
- Who do they follow (influencers)?
- What challenges do they face?
- How can you help them give a good experience or lead a better lifestyle?
Be Authentic
Though your ultimate goal is to drive brand awareness and product sales by content marketing. The key rule of content marketing is to put your content first. You need to tell stories that are useful, relevant, and entertaining to your audience. Educating your audience and providing value should be the core of your content marketing. If you put your product first in every content, they will lose the trust at the beginning.
Act like a publisher
You need to behave like a media house or a publisher to showcase your content marketing effort. One of the early examples is The Guinness Book of Records.
The founder of Guinness Breweries started a publication comprising the World Records in 1955 to ultimately entertain and educate their ideal buyer and eventually boost their lost sales of alcoholic beverages.
Create an editorial calendar
More like a Marketing Calendar, the planning process starts with creating an editorial calendar. You need to set up a disciplined process that clearly maps out your content cadence and schedule while you are able to map out the topic much easier.
Invest in training your writers and creators
While you need an editor to manage your content creation process. You should definitely train him/her and the other content creators/freelancers so they understand why they are creating the content while keeping the end goal in their minds. The team should equally be responsible for not only creating content but also distribution and measuring multiple KPI’s (social shares, lead collected).
Make Content at Scale
You need to be real here. Creating completely new and authentic content is not just time-consuming, but also not tested in real life. That is why you need to create a good blend with the content you’re producing for your platform (website, social, blog).
A good strategy is to segment your content into 4 parts.
- 30% Original Content (Thought Leadership Blogs, Original Video Content)
- 30% Curated Content (Recreated Blogs, Explainer Social Videos)
- 20% Experimental Content (Vertical Videos, Lists, Podcast)
- 10% Trendy Content (Status, Opinion Video, Re-shares, Repurposed)
Create Content for every stage
You have to create content for every stage in your buyer’s journey.
The early stage: Awareness is consists of Top-of-the-funnel content like eye-catching videos, infographics, data, and actionable lists.
Take a look at this social content from a leading brand Teer in Bangladesh that resembles the awareness stage. This type of content works well when the audience has little or no interest in your product.
The mid-stage: Consideration is consists of Industry oriented content, analysis, reports, guides (like this!) to help the audience solve a problem. It happens when the audience has little interest in your product/ brand.
The last stage: Decision happens when your audience has a strong interest in your product or services. You need to create, customer case studies, product guides, testimonials and reviews, service-specific information to get sales.
Think Backward
While it’s important to create content for your every sales stage. In order to see the result of your marketing effort, you need to look back and evaluate how each content contributed to your ultimate goal of meeting KPIs. Which content gets more traffic, which content gets more newsletter signup, and which content gets more lead/ customer conversion.
Do not think of your content as an individual piece. You need to bind them in one loop and each piece of content should contribute to your final marketing goal. A pillar strategy in your content creation process may help you to focus on a specific service and build multiple, yet relevant content around the same topic. Inspire through design
This is just a basic framework for your content marketing need. If you’re looking to craft the full content marketing strategy for your business in Bangladesh and
