Today, Outbound Marketing campaigns (or any activity that interrupts viewers) are no longer as effective to influence or help convert viewers as they used to be.
Your content needs to reach viewers in the most natural way possible (aka inbound). A popular way to do this is to create a story for your content – or tell a story. If you do, your content will feel more authentic, engaging, and relevant to your audience.
So what is Content Marketing? What types of content marketing are popular today? Join me to “discover” through the content below.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience.
The Content Marketing process helps drive factors such as brand awareness, sales, reach, engagement, and customer loyalty to your business.
Benefits of Content Marketing for businesses
Content marketing helps businesses with the following:
- Guide and provide information to potential customers about the products and services you provide
- Help increase conversions
- Help build relationships with customers, improve customer loyalty to the business
- Show users how your products and services solve their problems
- Increase your brand awareness
Besides, good content is also an advantage for businesses to increase website traffic as well as Fanpage interaction.
Now, let’s take a look at the different types of Content Marketing.
How Popular Content Marketing Types
There are many forms of content marketing that you can choose to incorporate in your strategy, some of the most popular of which include:
With over 3.6 billion social media users globally, it’s easy to see why so many businesses invest in social media marketing.
There are many different social media platforms ( like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat ) where you can implement content marketing. Especially Facebook is now considered one of the most prominent marketing platforms.
Besides, there are many ways to do Content Marketing so you can create and share your content on each of those platforms (for example, images, online videos, email marketing, pre-recorded videos or stories, etc.) …).
#2. Infographic Content Marketing
Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-view and easy-to-understand graphical format.
With a combination of simple words, brief statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to communicate your content effectively.
Infographics work well if you try to distill knowledge-based information or explain in a concise, easy-to-understand way about complex topics so that viewers can understand it. This is one of the most effective ways to optimize images .
#3. Blog Content Marketing
A blog is a type of content that has an impact and allows its users to be creative to achieve their goals with the topic they want. It can be seen that Blog is also a page with the most popular standard SEO articles today.
With Blog, you can do things like promote internal and external content, promote blog posts through links, add social sharing buttons and incorporate product information. .
#4. Content Marketing Podcasts
In a 2020 survey, the results showed that up to 37% of adults in the US had listened to a podcast in the previous month. For this reason, many businesses and media outlets have started to create and share their own Podcast content.
Podcasts allow users a lot of creativity because you can do with whatever topic you want.
In addition, you can also define other Podcast-related factors such as the rhythm of the episodes, who is on the Podcast, where you advertise the Podcast, and the duration of the episodes.
#5. Video Content Marketing
According to HubSpot, more than 50% of consumers say they want to watch videos from brands they interact with.
Additionally, video marketing can drive conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with video viewers.
You can also choose to share your video content on social media platforms, landing pages, or on partners’ websites.
In particular, Youtube is the largest video sharing platform today, investing in building content on Youtube helps you to earn more income for yourself.
#6. Paid Ad Content Marketing
Paid Ads can help you reach a wide audience and allow you to position yourself in all the places you want to be seen.
Paid advertising is especially effective and advantageous when combined with Inbound Marketing. For example , Google Ads ads .
There are many places where you can share paid ads including on social media, landing pages, banners banners, google Adsense ads or on sponsored content.
Google Adwords advertising service is also very popular today, if your business has financial ability, you should consider this campaign because it will accelerate the business plan very quickly.
7 Steps to Self-Taught Content Marketing for Beginners
Step 1. Set SMART Goals
The first thing in a Content Marketing writing strategy is to set SMART goals that meet 5 factors:
- S – Specific: Specific, easy to understand
- M- Measurable: Measurable
- A – Attainable: Attainable
- R – Relevant: Reality
- T – Time-bound: Time to complete
These goals need to be specific to your business – they will also likely complement your larger business goals and marketing goals.
Your Content Marketing goals could be:
- Raise brand awareness
- Increase revenue
- Increase conversions
- Increase customer loyalty to the brand
- Increase customer engagement
- Build relationships and trust with potential customers and potential future customers
- Attract strategic partners
Add more metrics and time to reach SMART goals, for example: Increase lead-to-purchase conversion rate by 2% by December of this year.
Step 2. Define KPIs
Next, set out Key Performance indicators (KPIs) for your SMART goals.
KPIs are quantifiable data points that you can use to measure actual performance against your goals.
Brand awareness:
- Website traffic
- Number of followers on social networks
- Number of registrations
- Mentions (by customers and partners)
Sales:
- Daily sales
- Website traffic
Convert:
- Conversion rate
- Cart abandonment rate
- Competitive price trends
Brand loyalty:
- Returning customers
- Promoter
- Number of product reviews
- Product Referrals
Customer interaction:
- Like
- Share
- Monitor
- Mention
- Backlinks
Strategic partners:
- Number of new partners
- Mention
- Backlinks
Step 3. Decide on the type of content
Next, choose the type of content you plan to create. To do this, start by thinking about your target audience and buyer persona.
Answer the following questions about your target audience to help you narrow down the types of content that work for them:
- What do they need from you?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- Why do they need your product or service?
- How do you help them solve their problems?
- Where do they usually spend their time?
Then review the types of Content Marketing we mentioned in the previous section to decide what type of content you will create.
Step 4. Choose your content channels
Once you’ve decided on the type of content you’ll be marketing to, it’s time to choose the channels to do so. Where will you share your content? Where will your content live and be shared from?
For some types of content, there will be channels you will definitely have to work on. For example, if you are creating content on Facebook, your channel will be the social networking platform Social Media. So pay attention to how to make good and interesting Facebook content to attract Facebook users.
Step 5. Budgeting
Now set a budget for your campaign. Think about the type of content you’re creating and the channel you’re marketing the content on.
Then ask yourself the following questions to determine a budget:
- Do you need to purchase any software or technology to create content? (such as Adobe Photoshop graphic design software, Canva subscription, purchase of a camera to take high-quality photos and videos, etc.)
- Do you need to hire any Content Marketers or designers (like designers, writers, editors, designers, etc.)
- Do you need to pay for any outdoor advertising?
- Do you need access to specific tools or resources that enhance or measure your particular content type?
Make a note of the answers that affect your budget, whether it’s an increase or a decrease in your budget from what you may have previously estimated.
Step 6. Write and distribute Content
Write and distribute your content so that viewers can reach and convert.
To make sure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it with existing and potential clients, use a social media calendar or a content editorial calendar.
This will keep your team up to date with all the content being created and allow you to schedule posts in advance.
If you do not specialize in these areas of content, you can refer to an external SEO standard article writing service to save more time!
Step 7. Analyze and measure the results
What is the final step of content writing? It’s about analyzing and measuring your results so you can make any necessary changes to enhance your content marketing efforts and reach a wider audience.
Review your SMART goals and respective KPIs to determine the success of your content marketing.
Have you achieved your goals and KPIs? Are you close to reaching your goal or not achieving it as you expected?
Here are some tools to help you analyze and see the results of your Content Marketing strategy:
- HubSpot Marketing Analytics Software
- HubSpot Social Media Management Software
- Mention
- Google Analytics
Above are all the suggested steps to build a Content Marketing strategy in your business plan.
Conclude:
With effective content marketing, you can reach your target audience and increase conversions.
There are many ways to do Content Marketing to increase sales, increase brand awareness and recognition, and build relationships with your potential and existing customers.
Don’t forget to extract more value from each piece of content that you create because it helps a lot for your Online Marketing campaign.
To get started, identify the type of content that works best for your business and target audience, and develop a content marketing strategy to start driving your bottom line today.
Hopefully with all my sharing on what is Content Marketing concept and 7 effective self-study Content Marketing steps for beginners, you can build your own successful Content Marketing strategy.
Source: fiexmarketing.com