You might think that content marketing is based around the blogs, Facebook posts, and web pages that work towards your business goals. The truth is, you’re only partly right. Social media marketing, business branding, and high-quality content are essential elements of content marketing, but there’s much more to it.
If you’re working in the field of digital marketing or you simply want to learn a little bit more about content marketing so that you can improve your business reach, you need to understand what is involved in developing a successful content marketing strategy. This article will outline some of the key areas that you should be looking at if you are a content marketer, business strategist, or business owner looking to improve your reach and online reputation.
Understand the Sales Funnel
The sales funnel is a term that refers to the buyer journey. That is, how can users go from your website or your content towards a conversion. there are three key phases of the sales funnel and they are:
- Awareness
- Evaluation
- Purchase
For most businesses, content marketing will be considered part of the outreach strategy which means that it sits somewhere towards the top of the sales funnel. the beginning of the sales journey or the top of the sales funnel is where brand awareness and lead Generation begins. This is the time where your business has the opportunity to cost a net over a broad range of people who you may consider your customer base or potential audience. According to Safari Digital SEO Agency, the most successful content marketers are those that have a strong sense of where content belongs in the sales funnel. A great content strategy will be able to engage customers through every part of the sales journey and keep them moving towards a conversion.
Make a Plan
It should go without saying that every content marketing strategy needs to have a solid plan. However, there are so many online businesses to jump between different tactics when they’re not immediately seeing results from content marketing. The key to successful content marketing is having a plan and sticking to it.
You can also use a content calendar to plan what your posting, where your posting it, and how often you are posting it. Having a content marketing strategy that includes outrage like guest posting and public relations is also crucial. Consider the areas where your distribution is going to take place and how it’s going to fit into your content marketing strategy.
Repurpose Content
Creating content is hard work. It doesn’t matter if you are a full-time content marketer, churning out high-quality content on a regular basis takes a lot of time and effort. As you consider your distribution network, it’s important to think about how you can repurpose content for different channels and how this can affect your marketing. For instance, let’s say you’re writing an instructional blog post, think about all the other places across your website that that blog post could also sit. It could also be used as a buying guide, turned into a video, and distributed throughout your social media network. Repurposing content is the key to having a continual flow without spending all your time constantly creating.
Conclusion
In order to create a successful content marketing plan, you need to have a clear vision, not just a loose idea of what you would like to do. Effective content marketing also takes a good amount of research, understanding of how you can use data and analytics to improve your content marketing efforts, and understanding of the most important tools. As you go through the above points, it’s important to continually refine your strategy as you find trends with what resonates with your audience and drives conversions for your business.
