Content marketing is a tool for attracting new customers and communicating with them through the distribution of useful content. It’s not mindless posting of publicly available material. Content marketing works if you create unique and expert material for your business niche. In practice, it looks like this: a user searches for information on the Internet, gets to your blog material, solves “pains” with its help, subscribes to your newsletter, begins to trust the brand and becomes a customer. When you properly implement content marketing into your business, you will get:
- additional audience;
- brand promotion;
- user trust;
- attract traffic to the site;
- increased sales.
Content marketing is a long game: first you build brand reputation, and then you increase audience interest and sales.
What kind of content should you prepare?
Content marketing does not dictate the rules for presenting useful material. It can be distributed in any format: write cool cases, articles and news, draw infographics, publish reports and results of social surveys, record podcasts and video lessons. The main thing is to make sure that customers get useful material. Content can be divided into news, useful (for business development) and entertaining. You do not need to say in every article or podcast “…and we have a great site and products, come and buy. We’re free here…for you…”. If you regularly distribute free and useful content – it will indirectly encourage customers to buy.
Stages of content strategy implementation in business
Content strategy includes all the nuances about materials, dates and sites for publications for a certain period (most often – a month). Stages of content strategy creation
Analyzing the target audience
If you don’t know for whom the content is useful (and whether it is useful at all) – don’t proceed to the next stages. Determine who your customer is, what resources he uses, what “pains” with the help of content you solve. Preferably analyze competitors in your niche.
Create a content plan
A content plan is a document in which all the details are described: when there will be publications, on what topics, in what format, on what sites. If you are writing seo-texts, include in the content plan key phrases to prepare each topic. A content plan avoids chaotic content preparation and posting. Content marketing is the systematic distribution of materials. Often young brands think that content marketing is fruitless and useless. The secret is that the method of attracting customers through useful materials does not work immediately: traffic on the site and sales begin to grow after at least 5 months, and if you publish unnecessary content – it will not bring results at all.