Content Marketing: The Steps You Need to Succeed

A blog post here or some social media posts there is unfortunately not enough to cut in today’s competitive digital marketing world. Businesses need a more consistent and holistic content strategy to establish brand awareness, increase website traffic, and ultimately fuel their conversion funnel. Setting the right strategy requires understanding your audience, your industry, and even your position or voice within your industry. Successful content marketing can make you an industry thought leader; unsuccessful content can make you another voice in a cluttered space.

Below are a few content marketing steps to create a successful strategy.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a great way to establish an online presence, build brand awareness, and strengthen inbound marketing efforts. Processes will look a little different for everyone; the best type of content to produce to market a brand varies depending on what the company does and the audience they’re targeting. You might create content in the form of social media campaigns, blog posts, whitepapers, emails, videos, case studies, Ebooks, or webinars. Before you jump into the content creation process, it’s a good idea to have a roadmap of what you plan to do and why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Your Three-Part Content Marketing Guide

This list covers the basic of a content marketing strategy. For more information specific to your brand, contact a professional marketing agency!

1. Define Your Goals

The first step to launching any marketing effort is to determine which goals you want to achieve. Understandably, most brands seek to increase sales. It can take time to nurture a lead, so rather than solely looking at how much more revenue you’re making or how many new customers you have, it’s good to have some micro-goals directly related to your marketing efforts.

Some examples of this are growing your social media engagement or following, increasing your website traffic, or getting more form or email sign-ups. Look to goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.

2. Develop Your Target Audience

One of the most important aspects of content marketing is knowing who you want to reach. Before diving into the creation process, you’ll need to decide who your desired audience is and how you can best reach them. What platforms are they using? What type of language and voice do you need to use to communicate with them appropriately?

You’ll want to create content tailored to this audience based on their preferences. A buyer persona for your target audience will help you better understand who they are, what they like and don’t like, their demographics, etc. You can build this representation of your ideal audience based on research, data, and an educated guess.

3. Conduct Content Research

Now that you’ve developed a buyer persona for your desired audience, it’s time to start building a framework for your content. An easy place to get ideas is your direct business competitors and others within your industry. Take note of the content they generate and pay attention to the specific content that yields the most engagement. If you have already been posting your own content, take a look at the types of posts and topics that performed the best.

Take a look at trends across the digital space, including what people are talking about, what questions they’re asking, what keywords they’re searching for, etc. Keyword research is an especially important step in this process for website content and blogs that can’t be overlooked; 71% of marketers say using strategic keywords was their top SEO strategy. Doing this will improve your content’s ranking when someone searches for a specific topic on search engines.

Key aspects of content marketing to keep in mind to generate a successful outcome include:

• Establishing specific goals;
• Knowing your target audience;
• And creating high-quality content tailored to your desired audience. Conducting in-depth research and using SEO best practices will assist in giving your content an edge against your competitors.

If you want to establish or improve your content marketing efforts, rely on the experts at Front Porch Solutions. We specialize in content strategy building and will produce high-quality, relevant content to generate successful results for your brand. Contact us today to request an assessment!