As a marketer or business professional, you may be strapped for time and resources, and best intentions for great content marketing efforts may fall by the wayside. But that would be a mistake to let that happen to your business. Creating high-quality, readable and shareable content in the form of blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, studies and more is becoming all important to today’s online marketing efforts.
Google’s made recent algorithmic shifts for web masters and content professionals now include the phrase “high-quality sites that users will want to use and share.” In making this change, Google has forced marketers to get better with quality website content in order to rank on the first page.
Here are four things you need to ask yourself before starting a content marketing campaign for your business:
1) “How much do I know about content marketing?”
You’ve probably heard the term “content marketing” over and over again, but do you fully understand what it is and how does it apply to your business?
Content marketing is the practice of content -- articles, web pages, blog posts, social media, videos, images, and infographics -- as a promotional vehicle for your business. The underlying idea of content marketing is to provide prospective customers with informational, entertaining, and relevant information. Rather than using "salesy" jargon, content marketing at its core works best with long-tail subjects related to your business.
Before you start in content marketing, gauge your knowledge level on this topic. Here are three quick tips:
- Research companies who are doing content marketing right
- Read content marketing blogs
- Support your efforts with agency help
2) “Who is my audience?”
Have you defined the key persona of your business yet? Creating content that calls to your key audience requires close interplay between the creator and the viewer, touching on all stages of the lifecycle.
Here’s how to learn more about audiences for your content. You can define your demographic and psychographic groups by testing qualitative research (focus groups or interviews) or quantitative research (web analytics). There are two audience stages that you’ll want to define through market research:
- Primary audience (decision maker) - Businesses usually have three to four key audiences
- Shadow audience (others who may read your communication) - Think journalists, thought leaders, competitors
Within your core audience, you may have a complex audience in all the stages of your customer lifecycle — the development stage, the education stage, and the action stage.
3) “Am I able to maintain a steady flow of content?”
Content marketing takes both time and manpower. You can’t just throw a website or blog post up and expect that one piece of content to bring in business. Create multi-channel content that reaches customers takes time and effort. Some of the ways you can make your content valuable is to distribute in via social networks, your own blog posts, external guest blog posts, press releases, white papers and product pages. Create an editorial calendar that schedules out your content production, and creates a cohesiveness between the above channels.
If you don’t have either the time or resources to execute a full-scale marketing campaign, consider hiring help. Just make sure you find the right agency partner; one that has similar values, has a track record of success, and has a breadth of talent (creative, research, copy, outreach) to suit your business’ needs. Your agency should ideally have in-house talent of writers, creatives, editors, and SEO specialists, as all of these areas can boost your content marketing efforts.
4) “Am I educated yourself on key performance indicators (KPIs) of content marketing?”
How do you know that your content marketing is effective if you don’t measure it? Web measurement has grown in the last decade where we know much about cost per impressions, clicks, or conversions via banner ads, paid search, and paid social advertising. However you have to dig a little deeper to measure content marketing-related activities accurately.
Content marketing is measurable, it just takes time to get the right data points. Your content marketing efforts should be measured after six months - or every quarter. You can do a quarter by quarter analysis using some of the following metrics:
- Value Indicators: converted leads, cost per lead
- Top of the Funnel Metrics: blog subscribers, social subscribers, website visitors, page views, conversion optimization, page rank, content shares, AdQuality scores, social engagement and followership
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