Jumpstart – content marketing

Today, in the age of digital marketing content marketing has become a prime strategy. It is an outbound strategy of distributing relevant, valuable and consistent content to the pre-defined audience and drive desired action.

A research done by CMI shows that 76% of B2C and 88% of B2B marketers are doing content marketing. I expect this trend will continue to grow and more marketers will adopt this strategy.

If you’re new to content marketing, here is all you need to know to jumpstart successful campaign.

The Content Marketing

Content marketing essentially encompasses creating relevant content that offers value to your defined target audience. When distributed it encourage your audience particularly towards a certain action like making purchase or downloading apps etc.

In content marketing marketer basically try to answering questions that pre-defined audience might have and finding ways to solve those problems, which encourages them to make purchase or repeat purchase.

Content marketing roadmap to success

#1  Set Measurable Goals

First thing – determine exactly what you want to get out of your content marketing. You should define some clear goals you want to accomplish with content marketing.

Try to make specific and measurable goals like increasing web traffic by 10% in a month, or increasing 25% online sales in 3 months etc. so that you can analyze your success later on.

#2 Leverage Buyer Personas

As a content marketer you need to understand your target audience and craft messages, promotions, and outreach that deliver real value and leads to long-lasting relationships. It is about speaking to your target audience on a personal level.

The best way to create effective and relevant content is by leveraging buyer personas – specifically, by understanding your target customer and their needs.

To create useful buyer personas, it’s vital to recognize and rank order,

• the “work” that the target must do to succeed
• the “troubles” that prevent them from doing work, and
• the “advantages” that will arise after completing the work.

Knowing the work, troubles, and advantages ensure your content resonate with target buyer persona.

In order to remain meaningful, relevant and valuable your buyer personas must be constantly refined, based on real-time data. That means researching and studying the challenges, priorities, motivations and obstacles your target buyer faces, among other attributes and creating empathy.

#3 Avoid over “sales pitch”

The major pitfall many content marketers fall into is focusing aggressively too much on their own predefined business goals and not on addressing customers problem.

The primary purpose of your content should be answering your target’s questions and offering solutions to their problems. Getting them to make a purchase should be the secondary purpose.

Content marketers should avoid over sale content, and instead think of how their offerings can be presented as a solution to their audience’s unique problems.

#4 Promote

Even the best of content is useless if it does not reach the target audience. In fact, creating valuable, consistent and relevant content is only half job done. The other half is about making sure that the content is exposed to the right people.

Besides good organic SEO, the only way to remain competitive is by making efforts to promote your content effectively.

For instance, basic promotion strategies include leveraging on social media, content communities, working with influencers and paid promotions.

#5 Analyze

To be effective content marketer need to evaluate the results and dig the data gathered constantly. If they don’t analyze their content strategy, there’s no way to improve it.

It crucial for content marketers to ensure that content maps to the pre-defined goal. This may require alterations and adjustments to existing content as well as creating new content to fill any gaps. You can add new insights, remove stuff that is not working and constantly test different pieces.

A study found that content marketers who check their analytics 3 or more times a week achieve higher ROI than those who don’t. Therefore, you should use analytic tools to get insights and refine your strategy to make it as targeted as possible.

 Conclusion

Content marketing is an ongoing process of communicating with your target audience. Moreover it is done without selling and is a non-interruption marketing strategy.

Instead of sales pitch, you provide information that makes your target customer more intelligent. The core of this strategy is the belief that if marketer, deliver consistent and valuable information to target audience; they ultimately reward marketer with business and their loyalty.

If you pay attention to the above given five points, you can successfully jumpstart your content marketing and I am sure you’ll be ahead of everyone else who’s just starting out with you.

If at any time you have questions particularly about content marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out.