This guide, in which we will share important action suggestions, will be a great roadmap for you. If you are ready, let's get started without wasting any more time!
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that involves creating consistent content that has a certain level of value and relevance, targeting a known audience, and ultimately mobilizing them.
As you may notice, the key word in this definition is “value.”
We can say that this word separates content marketing from all other marketing and advertising methods. If users prefer to follow or benefit from an item regularly instead of ignoring it, then the item in question is part of the content marketing strategy.
After content marketing presents this “valuable” content to users, it should not neglect to motivate them and get action from them. This action can be anything that will bring value to your brand: Your users can share the content within their own networks, subscribe to your newsletter, buy your products or give feedback. For this reason, social networks, blogs, visual content and tools such as e-books or webinars offered to special users can be shown among the channels that are widely preferred in content marketing studies.
Content marketing is perhaps the most versatile tool in the digital marketing field. This tool, which can be evaluated in different subjects or formats, can be easily adapted to any stage of the sales process. However, this versatility can also lead some marketing experts to the mistake of “producing content just for the sake of producing”. For this reason, a content marketing strategy needs to be created in order for the content to reach its value and long-term goal. In this way, it will be possible to provide ROI (return on investment).
Content marketing is not a process of generating advertising content that appears to be non-existent. As Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says: “Content marketing is not about “what you sell”, it’s about “what you stand for”.
So content marketing is not about what you sell, but what your brand represents. When done right, content marketing is a great way to create a connection with customers. And with a well-implemented content strategy, you gain trust and respect in the marketplace. Your company is positioned at the center of the discovery and purchase cycle, and you have a direct impact on what users see, read, and think.
The concept behind an effective content marketing strategy is to tell stories that people can relate to. Your content should not be seen as “marketing” or “sales” by your users. This will also allow you to sell more by “not trying to sell”! Your content should promote your brand and increase your sales, as well as help your customers, produce values that they will find useful, and meet their needs.
This will allow you to reach and influence more and more people. When you use it in this way, your content marketing strategy will become the most powerful tool that sets you apart from others. If you answer “Yes” to the following questions, then we should state that you can reach these goals from the top to the bottom of the pyramid thanks to content marketing.
Do you want to improve your reputation?
Are you aiming to grow your social community?
Looking for new resources?
Do you want to increase the number of users who subscribe to your list via email?
Do you want to conduct your communication with your brand identity?
Do you want to convert your customers into regular customers?
Looking to build a niche-specific audience?
It is also important to reveal what you are aiming for in each piece of content you create. This will not only help you determine the goals of your future content, but will also help you track existing content and measure its success.
Why Do Businesses Need a Content Marketing Strategy?
Perhaps more important than what content marketing is, is understanding why businesses need it. Compared to other marketing methods that provide very fast returns, such as list purchases, PPC (pay-per-click) or trade show promotions, where you can obtain name and email address information in seconds, content marketing may seem like a huge burden. Content marketing is often used when businesses realize that these methods are ineffective, too expensive, not applicable, or have all of the above. Let’s examine the following examples that show the difference between content marketing strategies and other methods:
Let’s say you’re using PPC as your primary tool to generate the customers your business needs. When you need more followers, let’s say you bid $2 for each click on a keyword. As a result of your month-long campaign, you generate 1,000 customers and spend $20,000 in total.
What about the next month? You will have to make the same overseas chinese in uk data expense again in the next month and this will continue in the coming months. If you want to continue to gain customers with PPC, this is what you need to do. In other words, when you tighten your purse strings, customers will stop coming. The same applies to the channels and methods you use to gain customers, such as list acquisition, trade show promotion. Now let's consider the opposite of this situation and talk about blogging.
Let's assume that your conversion rate from visitor to customer on your blog is the same as your PPC campaign and is 2%. This means that you will gain two out of 100 people who read your blog post as customers in the first month. The difference between the content marketing strategy and PPC here is that you do not need to make the same effort in the same area in the coming months. Moreover, over time, the content in question will continue to contribute to users' orientation to your site. In addition, not only that post, but every blog post you write will continue to serve the same function.
In other words, content marketing builds businesses on targeted traffic in a predictable, scalable, and inexpensive way, without requiring a regular monthly investment.
Content marketing provides supportive contributions to other marketing channels. It provides additional content for social media marketing and contributes to SEO efforts by creating natural internal links. Moreover, it also ensures that your site is viewed more in search engines with quality content. We can even say that many companies' SEO efforts should be carried out in accordance with their content marketing strategies.
Where to Start Your Content Marketing Strategy?
Below you can see the life cycle of a content production process. We will discuss the steps of this life cycle in the following sections of our article.
There are two steps that all successful content marketing strategies are based on as a starting point. We can classify them as :
a. Definition of goals
b. Job description . We can say that these two basic elements are the key elements of content marketing. Because they not only help you decide what kind of content you will produce, but also help you understand what kind of content you should not produce by evaluating content projects from a business perspective.
In her book “Content Strategy”, Kristina Havoron, one of the successful names in the industry, presents the structure you can see below for creating a content strategy and mentions that this structure can be applied to both digital and offline content production. She also reveals exactly what you need to consider when creating a basic content strategy for your business. Here, in the gray area, you can see the content-related components - i.e. defining the goals - while in the red area, you can see the human, i.e. job description part of the basic content marketing strategy. Now let’s expand on these interconnected sections a little.
Content Components: What, Why, and Where Questions
The main idea is the component that forms your basic strategy, where you determine what kind of content your business needs and what the key messages are. The main idea should be created based on your business’s goals and your target audience’s interests. It determines how you will source and shape your content.
The audience profile you want to reach
What will that audience get from your content?
What topics do you want to talk about?
What is the main idea behind each section?
What is the source of your content?
The second part of the infographic, which is related to content, is the “architecture”. Architecture is undoubtedly the component related to the format, organization and display of your content. The questions you should ask yourself about the structure of your content are as follows:
What formats will your content have?
What channels should you use to reach your target audience?
How will users consume your content?
What are the most ideal channels you can choose to communicate with your target audience?
How should your content interact with other content?
How should metadata and other tags be used?
After creating the basic structure of your content according to the criteria we have listed above, asking the following two questions to both yourself and the users will be much more useful in achieving the target of the structure of your content in order to make it more appealing to the users.
What are the 2-3 most important things that users who come to your site or content want to learn/find or do?
What are the top 2-3 things you want users visiting your site or content to learn / find or do on your site?
The answers you give to these questions become the most important questions in the architecture of both your website and your content.
Human Components: How and Who Questions
The workflow is about mapping out your content production process, identifying the tools you want to use, and the people who will execute content marketing strategies that will successfully produce high-quality results.
Who on your team should be responsible for this issue?
What are realistic timeframes for creating content?
Where will your resources come from?
How will your content be published and will this affect the site format?
At what stage will your content need to be reviewed and approved again?
The last piece in the infographic, the management section, is about who will make the important decisions regarding your content or content strategy. Who is responsible for your business's content strategy?
Who is responsible for your business's content strategy?
Who is your strategy officer?
Who determines the format and style of the content?
Who is responsible for evaluation and review in the final stages?
Who determines the workflow and process?
Who is responsible for measuring the success of the study?
Research and Analysis
With the research and analysis step, which is the first step of the content marketing cycle, you can determine whether your content is relevant and how well it addresses your target audience and business needs. Whatever your company's goals are, your marketing strategy and your content marketing strategies should all focus on one or more goals. When determining your content strategy, it is very important to know your company's marketing strategies from different sources and the basic approaches in these marketing strategies. In this way, you can support your content marketing strategies with the story underlying each marketing theme and reinforce your brand's narrative.
1. Know Your Site
If you are not creating a new site or continuing with a small site, then you need to start by reviewing your previous content. When you are aiming for a new content strategy, it is very important to make a detailed evaluation of the site. In this way, you can have an idea about the current architecture and quality of your site.
If you want to make a quick and basic assessment of the parameters such as traffic volumes and performance of the content on the site, you can create an inventory of the quantity of your content. This inventory can include features such as content locations, formats, page types, traffic, bounce rate, social shares, links. You can also add parameters such as word count, readability values, author and date to these.