Around 79% of companies report that content marketing is responsible for their lead generation. However, creating a content marketing strategy for your brand is nothing less than a challenge.
It requires a lot of work and an understanding of the key factors in content marketing. Today, we’re going to talk about those factors and a few important factors of content marketing. So, let’s dive right into it.
Introduction: What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a marketing technique that uses unique and valuable content to attract potential customers. This can be done by creating blog posts, videos, e-books, and other types of content. Content marketing is not a new concept.
It has been around for decades and has evolved over the years because of the changing technologies. The main goal of content marketing is to create valuable content that will attract customers and keep them engaged with your company or brand.
That’s why content mills and content-creation teams all around the globe work tirelessly. Many companies have used them for various purposes, such as generating blog posts, articles, product descriptions, etc., at scale.
However, it’s all made possible because of content marketing’s various funnels, which include:
- Top-of-the-funnel or TOFU
- Middle-of-the-funnel or MOFU
- Bottom-of-the-funnel or BOFU
Each funnel content is different and leads with a diverse objective. As indicated in this chart, the first funnel’s task is to generate awareness and buzz surrounding a brand. So, through email or organic traffic, it makes the target audience conscious of the existence of your brand.
The second funnel is where most of the lead generation happens. While it’s vaguely put in the chart that it’s about those specific types, but it can be equally about blogging, website copies, and emails. Remember, the second tier is about lead generation.
So, it’s equally important. Lastly, your brand begins to yield results at the bottom of the funnel. This part of your strategy bears the most fruits as the customer’s reactions and stories come pouring in. Thus, this could include reviews, success stories, etc.
7 Key Content Marketing Strategies In 2022
Now that we know the fundamentals of content marketing strategy, it’s important to talk about the basics of a few strategies. In this section, we’ll explore a few tactics that many experts around the globe employ.
These individual strategies are important in creating a content strategy on a vast scale. So, treat each of these six aspects as a way to understand the basics and fundamentals of a documented content plan. Here we go:
1. Understanding The Audience: Importance Of Building Customer Personas
The first step of any content marketing strategy is to build customer personas. These personas allow the content creator, SEO expert, and all the other heads to come together and devise a plan. So, that the content doesn’t only perform well but reaches its target audience.
But, in order to understand the audience, one needs to research the audience. In content marketing, these personas are often known as customer or buyer personas. It allows one to understand for whom they should be creating their content.
So, what exactly is in a buyer’s persona? It includes things such as:
- Common background and job details;
- Attitudes and motivation;
- Demographics, such as age groups;
- Primary platforms or sources of information, i.e., social media, blogs, emails, etc.;
- Goals and things needed in a product, i.e., most common features like price, performance, etc.
- Pain points include the key challenges they face and their concerns surrounding a niche or product.
These are only some of the key aspects of creating a customer persona. It depends from brand to brand. So, if you’re a B2B business, you won’t be looking for personal info and hobbies. Instead, your customer persona would include professional challenges.
That’s why it’s important to understand the basics of creating customer personas before proceeding with your content strategy.
2. Content Creation Tactics: Retaining Originality & Writing Unique Text
Content creation is one of the key aspects of any online marketing strategy. Now, we’ve talked about emails, messaging, and whatnot. However, it’s important to ensure that all of the aforementioned contents are original. Here’s why:
- Original content stands out in SERP;
- Search engines prefer unique content;
- Unique and original content improves the brand’s credibility;
- Plagiarized content won’t sell, nor will it rank.
That’s why it’s important to make a content creation tactic that you can use every time you write content. It might look like this:
- Write content after researching thoroughly;
- Add relevant visuals/infographics in it;
- Don’t copy text from someone else’s work;
- Give your text a unique and eye-catching structure;
- Check the originality of your post content before publishing it online.
As unique content plays an important role in content marketing, always utilize a plagiarism checker online to check its uniqueness. In this way, you can detect all the plagiarized text from your content and update it before publishing it online.
3. Conducting a SWOT Analysis to Learn about Your Competitors & Strengths
SWOT analysis is the backbone of any content marketing strategy today. It involves understanding the basics of the challenges that a business faces n marketing and against its competitors. Here’s what the acronym means:
- S stands for strengths, aka the leading factors or KPIs
- W stands for weaknesses, aka the challenges faced by the business;
- O stands for opportunities;
- T stands for threats, such as content or competitor challenges.
Now, conducting a SWOT analysis for your marketing requirements can be a difficult task. But, it’s something that becomes a part of your strategy naturally. That’s why you need to identify a few things, such as:
- The primary platforms used by your closest competitors;
- Their primary lead generation point, i.e., websites or blogs.
Then, you need to identify your own strengths, such as the type of content you’re good at making. Unless you’re a brand with a dedicated content team, you’d have to do everything yourself in the beginning.
So, focus on the content you can make by yourself, such as emails, social media posts, etc. Then, understand the threats that you’re facing. Are you running out of budget? Do you have to generate enough traffic before the Christmas breaks?
What are your brands’ primary challenges? Note them down and place them on a pin board to remind yourself of these aspects at all times.
4. Devising A SEO Plan
SEO or search engine optimization is the key to success for any business or brand in today’s content marketing landscape. That’s why SEO of your website is an important part of your branding. It’s important to ensure that you optimize the website for search engines and have a good ranking in the SERPs.
Usually, a good SEO strategy should be based on three pillars:
- On-page optimization: This is about optimizing the content and structure of your website for search engines.
- Off-page optimization: This includes backlinks, social media, press releases, etc.
- Link building: This involves creating links to other websites to increase your site’s authority.
Therefore, it’s important to use the metrics you gathered earlier and to employ a brand-centric SEO strategy to stand out in organic searches.
5. Implementing a Messaging Strategy that Helps your Brand Stand Out
A messaging strategy is something that allows you to directly contact your customers. This aspect of the strategy is important in the building phases, as it allows you to build awareness directly. And the best part about it all is that if you do it properly, it can be absolutely free.
Now, how do you message your potential customers to help your brand stand out? By picking out the platform that’s most suitable for this. This includes social media channels and emails. But, some things are a bit more important than picking the right platform, such as:
- Establishing the goal of this message;
- Finding out the brand’s content voice;
- Focusing on a unique proposition or CTA;
- Talking directly to your audience, i.e., in first person.
Now, it’s important to note the one thing we discussed earlier in the topic: to stand out with a message. So, that’s something you’d have to figure out yourself and find out which aspects of your business or offers can make your brand stand out.
6. Building Relationships with Influencers
A good relationship with influencers is an important part of booming content marketing strategies. While many influencer-marketing campaigns have been successful in the past, it is becoming harder to find relevant ones for your business.
The solution is to use an influencer marketing platform that can help you identify relevant influencers and manage your campaign. These influencer marketing platforms can help brands find the right influencers for their campaign and manage relationships with them.
This includes platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, etc. Thus, it’s important to find the right influencers for your industry or niche and use them to advance your other platforms, such as blogs and websites.
7. Creating Guest-Posting Opportunities with Bloggers
Guest posting is one of the best ways to generate buzz around a new business. For branding, you need to stand out as a common name in your niche, and there aren’t many ways as effective as guest blogging.
The one important thing to understand behind this is SEO. It doesn’t only allow you to post as your name on other blogs but also earns a valuable backlink—a very important factor in SEO. That’s why you must find the right websites and influencers to guest blog with.
Links from high-authority websites pass some of their “link juice” to yours. However, you must ensure that any content you use for guest posting should be completely unique and plagiarism-free.
That’s because unique content is always appreciated by search engines and they rank it higher comparatively. So, always check for plagiarism in your content before you finalize it for a guest post.
If you don’t take measures to remove plagiarism from your work, you risk losing a valuable backlink and you probably won’t be entertained by the same website in the future as well.
What Are the Ideal Types of Content Marketing?
- Blogging
Blogging is a great way to promote your business and generate leads. It is also a great way to build your brand and establish yourself as an expert in your industry. You can use blogging for marketing your business in many different ways.
You can use it for lead generation, content marketing, or simply as a creative outlet for you to share with the world what you know about a certain topic. There are so many benefits of blogging that 78% of businesses report that their blogs bear fruit through content daily.
- Social Media Networks
Social media networks are an effective way to reach out to customers and potential customers. The best thing about social media is that it allows you to interact with your audience on a personal level. Besides that, social media networks are the perfect platform to build a following.
If there’s an online forum where you need to stay in constant touch with your target audience, then it’s social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. That’s one of the main reasons that 93% of marketers employ social media as an important aspect of their content marketing strategy.
- Video Content
Video content is another key type of online marketing nowadays. With an outreach of 92% of the entire internet population, video content is a great way to engage and interact with your audience. It can be used to tell a story, educate, or even entertain.
The video marketing trend is also making its way into the B2B space. There are many benefits to using video marketing in business:
- it’s more engaging than text-based content;
- it’s easier to digest and remember the message;
- and it can help grow your following on social media.
Thus, video content is one of the premier types of content marketing and should be used wherever possible.
- Emails
Email marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways to reach out to your customers. It is cheaper and more personal than other marketing channels. Today, around 89% of marketers employ email as the primary channel to generate leads.
Email marketing aims to increase customer loyalty, drive traffic to the company website, and increase sales. When it comes to content for email marketing campaigns, it can be about many things, such as:
- anything from a simple announcement about a new product launch;
- or an event coming up;
- or an offer for a limited-time promotion.
The content should be relevant and timely in order to get the best results. Moreover, email marketing has the biggest ROI out of any other marketing tactic. According to a study, the ROI potential of email marketing is around 3600% or $36 for every $1 you spend on it.
As is the case with all types of content, emails need to be unique and plagiarism-free as well. The reason is very simple, copy-pasted template emails do not evoke any response from the readers. They have already read plenty of such emails and will perceive it as insincerity.
What you can do is check for plagiarism in your emails and ensure that you are making them sufficiently personalized according to your target audience. This has a much higher chances of getting a favorable response.
That’s because people like to feel “talked to” and understood. With plagiarism-free content, you can improve the engagement rate of your emails.
Conclusion
Creating a brand-centric content marketing strategy isn’t an overnight process. It takes days, a lot of trial and error, learning, and going through a ton of tribulations before you can get it right. So, don’t worry about nailing the content marketing strategy for your brand on the first try.
Branding takes time, and you should approach it with patience and an open mind. So, follow these tactics and stand out against your competition.
nitinpandey594 Fiverr Seller PUBLISH ALL NICHE BLOG POSTS – INCREASE YOUR WEBSITE / BLOGS / FORUMS TRAFFIC I am a professional SEO Specialist and offering you quality backlinks support to Boost Up Your Domains. I have many quality sites on which you can publish your blog posts with your anchor text and I will publish your blog posts with a Do-Follow link status and will index them after publication. If you are interested then please give me a chance to do business with you and I am sure that you will be satisfied. I have many sites which alexa rank is remarkable and traffic is high, if you need more you can share with me
