Content Marketing Basics

Good content that is educational, useful and adds value are key factors to attracting audiences to learn more about your product or service and how it helps solves their problem. A concerning 38 percent of Content Marketers have a documented content strategy in place, according to research from the Content Marketing Institute. Don’t be that person. Content creation starts with a plan and a consistent process that focuses on helping your buyers make smart, well-informed decisions.

Plan

What is the purpose of your content? It’s important to plan and and set goals before developing your content around your buyer personas and where they are at in their buyer’s journey. Do you want to inform? Attract? Convert? Understanding how your content will help your buyers and what you plan to develop to portray that understanding before putting pen to paper, will help you stay consistent.

Create

Content can be created in many formats (ie., blogs, whitepapers, case studies) and the topics can be the same. However, they should be tailored so the stories are told in different ways for each audience, and where they are at in their decision-making process. Remember to create content that is educational and effective that provides educational answers to the problems your buyers are searching for.

Distribute

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2018 Annual Survey, 80 percent of B2B content marketers are focused on building audiences. Delivery of content helps make it consistent to build audiences. How? By using the right distribution technique to get the right content in front of the right person at the right time. Email distribution, blogging, social media or SMS—promoting content continuously is a good thing, just be sure to change the verbiage (and images) on every run.

Track and Analyze

As with any content marketing strategy, content analysis helps you gauge what’s working and what isn’t working so you can implement new solutions and efforts as efficiently as possible. Some metric examples to consider: number of visits, generated leads, inbound links and content performance by format, topic and/or author.

Content Marketing Best Practices At-A-Glance

  • Always focus on mapping content to your buyer personas and where they are at in their journey.
  • Less is more: Develop content that’s easy for the buyer to consume and understand.
  • Keep content educational, not promotional.
  • Always focus on producing informational content first, then design.

Today’s buyers are demanding a more personalized, customized relationship with the businesses they buy from.

Take a minute to read more on why this is in our inbound marketing and public relations blog post.