Content marketing is a strategy that involves creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience. If you’re not sure how to get started with content marketing, here are a few simple steps:
1. Define Your Target Audience.
Your target audience is the group of people who are most likely to buy your product or service. When creating content, it’s essential to keep this audience in mind. Identifying your target audience will help you determine what type of content to create and where to distribute it.
But how do you do this? Start by brainstorming a list of characteristics that describe your ideal customer. Then, use these characteristics to create buyer personas. You can also use market research to learn more about your target audience.
2. Set Your Goals.
No marketing campaign can succeed without defined goals. When setting goals for your content marketing campaign, ask yourself what you hope to achieve.
Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your website? Generate leads? Or something else entirely? Your goals will determine the type of content you create and how you distribute it.
For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you’ll want to create shareable content that promotes your business. On the other hand, if your goal is to generate leads, you’ll want to create content that encourages people to take action, such as signing up for your email list.
3. Have a Long-term Strategy.
Understanding your marketing goals is one thing, but achieving them is another. To succeed, you’ll need to have a long-term content marketing strategy. This strategy should include an editorial calendar to help you plan and organize your content.
Your editorial calendar should consider your goals, target audience, and the channels you plan to use to distribute your content. It should also include a mix of different types of content, such as blog posts, infographics, and videos.
4. Establish a Medium for Communication.
Content marketing is all about communication. But before you can start communicating with your target audience, you must establish a medium. This is the platform where you’ll create and distribute your content.
Some standard options include blogs, social media, email newsletters, and websites. It’s essential to choose a platform that’s well-suited to your goals and target audience.
For example, if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, you’ll want to focus on social media. If you’re trying to reach a more mature audience, email might be a better option.
5. Create Compelling Content.
Now it’s time to start creating content! When doing so, it’s important to keep your target audience and goals in mind. Your content should be valuable, relevant, and consistent.
To ensure your content is valuable, ask yourself if it’s informative, educational, or entertaining. Is it something your target audience will want to read or watch? To ensure it’s relevant, ask yourself if it’s related to your business, product, or service.
And to ensure it’s consistent, ask yourself if it’s in line with the rest of your content. Creating compelling content isn’t always easy, but you can take a content marketing course to learn more about it.
Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to start promoting it. There are several different ways to do this, depending on your channel. If you’re using social media, you can promote your content by sharing it on your profile and in relevant groups.
You can also run paid ads. If you’re using email, you can promote your content by sending it to your subscribers. And if you’re using a blog, you can promote your content by optimizing it for search engines and sharing it on social media.
