Basic Principles For Content Marketing

Content marketing is incredibly important for your business and over the years has transformed the way businesses interact with their customers acting as a powerful and informative tool where you’ll create tailored content to your customers needs and interests. In a nutshell content marketing is all about storytelling, which should engage your audience but is also beneficial for your SEO efforts and helps to rank you highly in SERPs for particular search terms or keywords increasing traffic to your website.

To get your content marketing strategy right, follow these basic principles:

Integrated Approach:
Along with your marketing and business strategies, content marketing should be a fully integrated approach to provide a seamless and coherent strategy across all channels you utilize.

Identify Your Goals:
Creating content is only beneficial if your determine the “why” in order to outline what it is your aiming to achieve with a content marketing strategy. Each business will have their own objectives to achieve, from generating brand awareness to more sales leads keep your objective in mind when creating your content and always make it relevant.

Who is your Audience?
To make your content marketing effective you’ll need to define your audience. Research where your audience is most active and identify channels they use to communicate ie. LinkedIn or Facebook. Consider pain points your target audience may have and understand how you can help with these, thus helping you to produce quality, tailored content; essential to attracting your audience and create engagement.

Implementing Your Content Strategy
There are numerous ways to create content and communicate with your target audience, from blogs, how to guides, newsletters, podcasts to emails it’s important to define a mix and utilise these in order to create maximum exposure across multiple platforms. Once you’ve identified your types of format you now need to choose your topics.

Remember the key to creating good content is to educate and be relevant to your audience. Go detective and find out what content your competitors are implementing and distributing, whats working for them as well as researching for trending topics.

Now you have the foundations for the types of content you’ll produce the next stage is the delivery of your content to your audience. Make sure it’s easily accessible across all platforms by incorporating shareable links for readers to share on social channels, make it visually impactful, engaging and most important relevant to your target audience.

Track, Analyse and Optimise
Distributing content is only beneficial if you can monitor the performance of each blog, how to guide or email you distribute. Using a platform like Google Analytics will help you scrutinize the effectiveness of your content further allowing you to gain granular insight into consumer behaviour based on your sites content. If your sharing content on social media make sure you track the URL with a UTM code to enable you to track where searches or campaigns directed a search to you and how valuable your content was.

“Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants.” Jonathan Perelman, Buzzfeed