A Step By Step Guide To Content Marketing In 2017

Content marketers would have to face higher competition in 2017 as the digital marketing eco space gets saturated. In this context, the right approach is to find the niche audience and cater to their content needs. This would not only help in fulfilling the marketing goals like branding, positioning, and creating awareness but also achieve your business objectives and increase conversion rates.

The year 2017 requires a more systematic approach to content marketing rather than publishing content without a proper strategy. The step by step process of content marketing described below would help you excel in your content marketing efforts and also attain the marketing goals.

1. Formulate your content marketing mission statement

Before you start content marketing, it’s vital to ascertain the mission statement or the purpose your content is going to serve. Ascertain the reason why your company is marketing content and the objectives it wants to fulfill through it. An objective can be making people aware of the product or the value proposition. For fulfilling the company’s goals through content marketing the below-mentioned questions should be answered.

• Who is your target audience and where can they be found?
• What type of information do you want to provide through your content?
• What do you want your audience to do after consuming your content?

2. Identify the key business goals

After you formulate the mission statement and the ways to achieve it list few of the key business goals that you want to achieve through content marketing. Examples of business goals may be as follows:

• Brand building
• Generating more sales leads
• Increased loyalty
• Building industry reputation

Once you demarcate the business goals that you want to achieve through your content marketing efforts, be imaginative and as creative as possible to find novel ideas and topics and implement them. Find out ideas to align your content marketing mission with your business goals even if they may not be executable at the moment. The next task is to note down the core messages that you want to convey to your audience based on your business goals and content marketing efforts.

3. Use your goals to come up with content ideas

The core message that you want to convey should be the yardstick for all the content you would publish. The tag lines, blogs or the infographics that you create should convey the core message that you want to communicate to your audience. Decide on the type of content that you want to create be it blog posts, magazine article, video, podcasts, webinars, infographic, newsletters, eBooks or reports. At the onset, you can start with blogs and articles and then as you gain expertise go on adding new types of content. Publish the type of content that is easy for you to create and in the format in which your audience wants it. Decide the frequency of publication of your content and prepare your publication calendar in advance.

4. Choose the platform for each type of content

Social media is important, and it is even more important to decide on which social media you want to be active on. Search for pages that are similar to yours on Facebook and cross check the engagement levels. If engagement levels are high, you may benefit from a Facebook page.

Do a competitor analysis on Twitter and find out the followers your competitors have. Find out the frequency of their tweets, and if you discover that your target audience is active on Twitter, you may also benefit by being active on Twitter.

If you are a B2B business, you can look for LinkedIn groups who would be interested in your content. Create a Google+ business page for your company which would ensure optimization of content for search engines. You can also choose forums in the niche market and engage with them to post your content. Make a channel plan and in it chart the type of content you want to publish in each of the channels with dates.

5. Create appropriate content and publish it

Create content based on the content marketing mission and the core message that you want to communicate to your audience. Keep an eye on the content marketers of your industry and read what they are writing. This would give you an idea about the readers’ expectations. It is profitable to read the best-selling books related to similar fields, and this may provide you ideas about the topics you would write. It is a great practice to jot down new ideas and utilize them in your content marketing efforts. You should regularly add to the list of ideas and keep on innovating on the ways you deliver content to your audience.

Create novel and new kind of content that bears the core message and publish it as per your calendar. You should make sure that the blogs, articles and other published materials contain the keywords according to your keyword research. It goes without saying that keeping an eye on the analytics of each channel that you use would give you an estimate of the engagement by the audience. Apart from this, you should also listen to your customers when they comment on social media or send you an email to know more about their likes, dislikes, and preferences. The better your understanding about the persona of your audience the more targeted would be your content which would fulfill all your objectives and goals.