A Complete Guide for Content Marketing

Chapter 1 – Understanding Content Marketing

What is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing can be described as s strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain clearly defined audience, ultimately driving profitable customer action.

“Content Marketing is not a new concept as first sign of content marketing can be dated back to 4200 B.C”

Content Marketing can help you to create a relationship that leads to trust because content marketing is basically delivering messaging to customers and without content; you’d have nothing to deliver.

Inbound Methodology

Content Marketing is an art of communicating with your prospects without having to sell to them

Inbound And Content Marketing Both Focuses On:

• Empowering potential customers
• Building a lasting Relationship with your audience
• Creating valuable content that is both informative and useful

How to Create a Successful Approach for Content Marketing?

The success of content marketing approach can be created by following the certain steps:

• The power of story telling
• Generating content ideas
• Planning a long term content strategy:
  1. 35% of B2B marketers have a documented content strategy
  2. 37% of x have a documented strategy
  3. Identifying your plan will help you create content more easily
• Building a content creation framework
• Become an effective writer
• Extending the value of content through re-purposing
• Analyzing and measuring content
• Developing a growth marketing mentality

Chapter 2 – The Power of Story Telling

Why does your business need a story?

Business requires a story it is all about creating alignment between your businesses, your prospects and customers.

“20 Hours is the amount of time an adult spends per week with digital media.”

Here is a shocking result about digital media in just one minute:

• 1,388 blog posts are published
• Facebook users share 2.5 Million pieces of content
• YouTube users upload 72 hours of new video content
• Twitter users tweet almost 300,00 times
• Instagram users post nearly 220,00 new photos

“Stories help your prospects make sense of decisions they’re about to make and storytelling is not about blending in but to stand out”

The three layers of a great content are:

• WHY – Why are you doing
• HOW – How will this help your audience
• WHAT – What you’re doing and what are your offering

Essential elements of Storytelling:

• Character
• Conflict
• Resolution

Storytelling point of view:

Your story should contain conflict is the lesson in how the character transforms through challenge. If your story lacks conflict, then you are not telling a story instead you are telling a simple selling point or pitch. When you are using a conflict, make sure that it should fit:

• Your prospects problem
• Your prospects needs
• Your prospects buyer journey stage

Spending the time outlining the problems, its solutions for products and services can greatly help you to understand the idea of conflict.

Chapter 3 – Generating Content Ideas

Why process is important to generate content ideas?

Process is necessary to generate new content ideas as it allows you to think of ideas that may not be easily apparent also to come up with a predictable flow of original content ideas. Most of the time, people come up with a question to the content writers, like “Where do ideas come from?” and this is where the idea process comes in to answer out the question.

So, exactly what is idea process?
Idea process is all about the layout or design before creating any content. The elements that make idea process are:

• Gathering raw materials
• Digesting the material
• Unconscious processing
• Eureka moment

To sum up about idea process, it is to gather materials from various places and consume the materials. This helps to maintain a respiratory for all those ideas that is gathered from the materials. When you get the required idea from the materials, don’t stitch all the ideas together to create a content, use the idea to do something different. There are few factors to keep in mind while generating ideas:

• What are your buyer personas reading habits?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What are people talking about on Quora?
• What can you learn from SEO efforts?

Chapter 4 – Planning a Long Term Content Strategy

Why is a long term planning important?

Planning is important for your content creation as it provides a roadmap for you. If you make a plan and are consistent in approach, then the result of achieving ROI from your content have the best chance.

A long term planning keeps you stay organized and always keep in mind that “Content is not just about supporting any marketing team, but it is a fuel that keeps the inbound methodology running”

Building a Plan:

• Setting Marketing Goals
• Auditing or assessing your organizations initiatives and assets
• Identifying the buyer’s journey to create your buyer persona

Whenever you are creating content, make sure to organize your content audit & even audit it into these categories:

Buyer Persona is about understanding the buyer’s journey and carefully pointing out the elements that can be used to create a great content. In a simple way, buyer persona represents your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customer. While creating a buyer persona, keep these key elements in mind:

• Customer Demographics
• Behavior Patterns
• Motivations
• Goals

However, the more details you can include the better persona you can create.

Chapter 5 – Building a Content Creation Framework

How do you build framework for content creation?

There are few steps to build a content creation framework and these are as follows:

• Conceptualizing your content
• Planning and settling timelines
• Creating a workflow
• Reviewing content
• Publishing & Promotion
• Organizing it internally
• Analyzing the results

While creating content, there are few points that should be kept in mind:

• Identify who is going to be doing what tasks
• Identify outside influencers will be contributing
• Have an initiative breakdown of the work

Resources needed to build a framework for creating content

Have you thought about the resources that you will need to build a framework for creating content? No? Well, here are the primary types:

• Content Management & Strategy
• Writing
• Editing
• Designing
• Coordinating

“Just because a piece of content is being created, doesn’t mean it can be published”

Creating content is not only the game to get good traffic, a good design layout also matters a lot to keep the audience engaged on the content. The content totally depends on the headline, images and the type you are working on. Most of the audience gets attracted to an appealing headline that answers their question and while going through the content, the audience scans for related images to comprehend the content details.

There are few things to be considered before publishing any particular content:

• Clear value proposition in the title
• Relevant image that supports the context of title
• Call to action in the upper right hand corner
• Using hyperlinks to redirect to the supporting resources

Chapter 6 – How to become an effective writer

Does it matter to become an effective writer?

Writing any particular content is not hard if you have the idea and the imagination to make up stories. But writing content for the customer is definitely something that needs to get worked out because even professional writers find it difficult sometimes to create an appealing content. Always remember that words are the currency of web and to be an effective writer you need to learn to use those words in your content.

So why does effective writing matter so much? Effective writing is all about creative content which is relevant and useful to the audience. This content helps the audience understand about your company and its number one priorities. Your content should include the audience language, answers to their queries and issues, challenges and goals.

To make sure your content is attractive enough to engage your audience, make sure to the content is relevant and informative which can be used and shared by the audience. Include images to keep them engaged and learn to write content that is educational, full of personality and that answers the customer queries.

How to attract audience with effective content?

Creating an effective content depends upon the how you would like to attract your audience and keep them engaged in your content. Effective writing has core attributes. Let us review the attributes in a more detailed way:

Attention grabbing headline

According to Copyblogger, 80% of the audience will read only the headline and remaining 20% will read the entire article. So, a creative and appealing headline will improve the engagement performance for your content.

Content headlines should be specific that can promise a reader how it will benefit them and make sure that the headlines should contain catchy words like How to, Why, Quick tips, Secret etc.

Tone needs to be relevant to the audience

Whenever you write any content for your audience, you should match the attitude of your audience with the subject matter. If you are writing something funny, serious, uplifting, quirky and humorous, readers might not be able to point out the message from the content. Always keep the subject matter relevant to your audience and ensure that the writing is human, inspiring and warm.

Informative and Useful Content

Your blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies and other form of content should be made in such a way that it educates the audience and make them learn something new & better. To first write such content, you should understand who your ideal reader is and what type of content they like to read. This will require you to create a buyer persona, through which you will understand better about their key points, interests, goals, challenges and information they are looking for.

Create content that makes it easier for the audience to search

Create a relevant content that can be easily searched by audience. Don’t include Google bots here as they will crawl all the content and display to the audience for their queries, but what else will make the audience to find your content in an easier way? Keywords. Yes, include keywords in your content that have high search volume but low competition. Include words that your audience is searching for, like if your target reader searches for “investment plans” rather than “financial planning”, you will naturally use “investment plans” in your content. Take help of various keyword research tools along with Google suggestions to create keyword list.

A Core Idea

Content is not about writing and publishing without any idea. According to statista, there are more than 31.7 million bloggers only from U.S. Tell me, how many bloggers do you know among them, very few? Of course, because the amount of content created by these bloggers has a strong core idea and the remaining bloggers just copy from them. Before creating content, have a core idea on what you are going to write about, who is the audience, the keywords, headlines etc. A core idea will help you create the best content an audience will ever get.

Conveys a message

Every piece of content you create should convey a message to your audience which shows your brand’s mission, vision, values and promise for the audience. The audience should get to know about your brand while reading the content.
To make sure during content creation using the buyer persona, ask yourself how this content will support the customer’s journey. If you don’t find any particular answers than create a content that helps you understand the motive behind your writing.

Relevant call-to-action button

Once you have got the required attention and engagement from the audience, you need to tell them what to do next. This can be simple, like asking to comment, share your content or it could be more direct like asking audience to call a number, subscribe to your newsletter or download the PDF.

Free from poor grammar and errors

Once you have completed your content that includes all the core attributes, now it’s time to proofread your content to check for any grammatical errors or use of poor words. The final stage is often rushed out to quickly publish the content, but believe me, take some more time to go through the content and make sure that every word, sentence and used data is accurate and perfect.

Chapter 7 – Re purposing Content

Why re purposing content is important?

Great content is the foundation of your content marketing plan. It attracts new visitors to your site, strengthens your online reputation, and builds trust, which ultimately leads to converting prospects into leads and eventually customers. However, it can take a lot of time and effort to create effective content on a consistent basis.

Re purposing content allows you to extend the value of your content by changing it to serve a different purpose, like transforming the messaging of a blog post into a video. The messaging is the same, but the channel or format in which it’s consumed is different.

How do you extend the value of your content?

Content republishing is the act of reposting your content, mainly blogs, on other websites with proper credit given to the original author. This approach allows you to focus on creating a great piece of content that you can promote on other websites besides your own.

To start, there are a few things to consider when republishing content to make sure your search engine optimization is not penalized.

• Make sure the source uses a canonical tag, which tells search engines this article is republished content—a copy of the original. This will connect search engine bots to crawl the page with the original article, so they can pass the “link juice” to the appropriate website or author.
• Make sure the re purposed content has a link at the beginning or the end of the post that connects back to your website. This is important, as new readers know where to go if they want to learn more from the original source.
• Have the source “NoIndex” their copy of the article. This avoids duplicate content issues, by telling search engines not to rank this content. However, this will not impact your rankings or the value of your inbound links.

Follow these points when republishing your content:

• There are hundreds of websites where you can republish your content, but strive to choose reputable sites to partner with. Sites like Business 2 Community, Social Media Today, Business Insider, Next Web, Huffington Post, Quora and Reddit.
• Only republish your top performing content. Not all of your content is going to produce high results. Only republish your best- performing content; if the content performed well on your blog, chances is high it will perform well on other sites.
• Take the time to update the headline of each republished piece of content. This will help each post stand out, especially when someone performs a search query. They’ll see multiple variations of your content, keeping it fresh.
• Include internal links throughout your post. This redirects to the supporting sources of your content.
• Make sure your content is a great fit for the site it’s being published to. If there’s not a section that’s relevant to what you’re writing about, then it’s not a good fit, and the value isn’t there.
• Make sure you include a call-to-action within your blog’s post. Remember, blogs are a great tool to convert visitors into leads.

Chapter 8 – Content Promotion

What is content promotion?

Content promotion is the distribution of content through a variety of media channels. Some channels include social media networks, blogs, email, and live events, just to name a few.

As a content marketer, it’s important to understand how to leverage promotion channels in order to connect with new audience members and prospects. You spend A LOT of time creating remarkable content in the hopes of helping others find solutions to be successful. Maybe it’s for a company, a client, or even for your own personal needs. Now, imagine that you were never able to share your solutions or knowledge with the people who need it most.

How painful it would be? So, with content promotion, you’re able to get your message to the people who need it the most! Once your remarkable content has converted viewers into leads, you’ll be able to personally deliver content at the times and places they’ll need it the most. Content promotion can also help communicate the value they’d receive as your customer, while also nurturing relationships that turn into delighted, lifelong promoters.

Content promotion will drive website traffic, improve engagement from audience members, prospects, and customers, and aid buyers in making purchase decisions with your business.

How do you excel at content promotion?

Organic content promotion is designed to increase the visibility of your content and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns without spending money on ad space, boosted content, or promoted content.

Some of the most effective organic content promotion channels are: search engine optimization, email marketing, social media, live promotions, like events or webinars, influencer networks, and, let’s not forget, the good ol’ fashioned word of mouth.

A benefit of doing organic promotion is increased brand authority across various platforms. Because the amount of content you can promote is not limited by a budget, you are able to use multiple platforms to promote quality content and increase awareness about your business and brand. However, the challenge is that you’ll need to ensure consistency around developing and publishing content regularly.

In contrast, paid content promotion allows you to show your content to a highly- specific audience. In most cases, you’re able to customize the target audience pool as well as the message, but you will have to spend money in order for anyone to see your content.

The most common channels for paid promotion are search engine ads that are placed on platforms, such as Google, Yahoo!, or Bing, and paid social media campaigns on platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

A benefit of paid promotion is the ability to develop and deliver highly-targeted content to consumers who will find the content most relevant. A challenge when doing paid promotion is securing enough budgets in order to achieve your desired results. To overcome this challenge, it’s best to experiment with a small budget to discover the best ways to achieve your desired outcome.

The most efficient way for organic and paid content promotion to work together is promote well-performing content. Content that performs well will have above- average engagement with it, such as likes, shares, re-tweets, and link clicks, which drive traffic to your website. Platforms like Facebook make this easy for you to understand, as they’ll tell you when you have a high-performing post and recommend that you increase its reach with ad spend. As a result, you’ll be more effective at increasing the reach of your content, attracting new audience members and prospects, and helping leads make better decisions about your business.

A content promotion calendar will help you keep track of various types of communications scheduled to go out and the dates and times for when they will be published. However, it is not a one-size-fits-all, which is why it’s important to create a promotion plan that will include details about your target audiences, internal and external communication channels, and the content that will be distributed across these channels. The content promotion calendar ties all of these details together to create a game plan for how and when communications will be released.

Once you have a calendar that details your promotional efforts, you can use segmentation to create a specific audience to receive your content. Segmentation is a powerful best practice to use when promoting content across multiple channels. Segmentation is used to divide large audiences or target markets into smaller segments based on specific criteria. It’s a helpful step that makes it easier for you to target the right people for your business and avoid showing ads or serving content to people who are ultimately not a good fit. When you use segmentation, you should always keep your buyer persona in mind and create segments that align with the interests, demographics, and geographical location of your ideal customer.

Your ability to segment your audience will vary by the promotion channel you use. Often, content marketers use segmentation for email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, and paid campaigns. Segmentation in email is typically done using lists with specific criteria of contacts in a company’s database. Keep in mind, the criteria in your list is based off pre-existing information you’ve collected from your contacts; this could be through analytics or questions you’ve asked them, like on a form. Social media campaigns can target audience members based on information contained in a user’s online profile, such as their interests, the city where they live, education, as well as lifestyle and interest traits, like cooking or hiking.

Paid media campaigns take segmentation even further, by allowing you to target audience members outside of your social network and who may have never heard of your business. Platforms like Google Display Network allow you to put your content in front of audiences on websites that are relevant to your business. By using segmentation, you’re not only creating a custom audience for your content, but it will make it easy for you to create a customized message for audience members across all channels. Which brings us to the next best practice: create a custom message for each channel.

Another thing to consider when developing your message is, how will you clearly communicate the value of the content you’re promoting? You want to be sure not to over-sell the value and promise more than what will be delivered. You also don’t want to undersell the value of your content, which can result in missed opportunities for your business. The important thing to keep in mind is that each message you create to help promote your content is like an invitation for audience members to engage with your business. As a result, you want to do your best to personalize each message for every recipient.

Optimization is used to achieve the best possible outcome for your promotion plan. When it comes to content promotion, there are three key areas you want to optimize: reach, engagement, and conversions.

• Reach is used to measure the size of your potential audience. This includes people who are directly and indirectly in your social network. Optimizing for reach helps you get the most potential eyes on your content. Think of this as the top of your content promotion funnel. You want to grow your reach as far and wide as possible while still remaining relevant.
• Engagement measures the number of interactions with your brand, such as likes and shares. When you optimize for engagement, you want to start by considering how a user is going to engage with that piece of content.
• Optimizing your content for conversions requires you to have a clear definition of what a conversion for your content type is and an understanding of how your promotion channels impact the conversion process. Conversions may be downloads, views, trials, demos, sign-ups, and the list goes on. To optimize for conversions in your promotion strategy, you’ll need to use a link to a landing page in all of your promotional efforts. This allows you to capture the required information for new leads, as well as use strong calls-to-action in your messaging and promotional assets. Overall, this will help enhance conversions for your content.

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