What is the Concept of Content Marketing?

When it comes to content marketing, it is a well-known concept. The internet is flooded with contents that talks about content marketing strategies, plans, framework, and execution. However, for beginners, it is still a confusing and tedious task. 

Many find it extremely hard to incorporate content marketing into their business strategy, and they fail and lose their way in between. 

In this article, we will try to explain and introduce you to the world of content marketing and will provide you with a big picture landscape on the concept of content marketing. 

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic and business process that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, consistent and relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately convert them to customers to drive more sales. 

In simple word, content marketing is all about your audience, what they value and how can you educate them. If this concept is incorporated properly, this helps to create a relationship with your audience that leads to trust and that helps your audience to make a decision while they are purchasing a product from you. 

Your content must deliver the message about your company or your products or your services to your audience. 

Content has the power to pull people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another stage such as strangers to visitors to leads to customers and finally to promoters. 

The Inbound methodology by HubSpot

Now, if you are confused between inbound marketing and the concept of content marketing and both seem similar, then you are right. Both of them have some similar goals. 

Goals of Inbound and Content Marketing 

•   Targeting potential customers
•   Creating valuable and relevant contents to entertain and educate the customers
•   Building trust and relationship with the customers

However, inbound marketing is not limited to these goals and includes more actions such as organizational structure, roles, responsibilities and skill sets. 

How to create a successful content marketing plan?

To create an effective content marketing strategy for your business, you need to incorporate content marketing from very basic of your businesses’ existence. 

You need to start from very effective storytelling. Every business has a story, and you need to tell it to your customers to deliver a message. Then you can focus on how to generate great content ideas. 

Generating content ideas that can attract a new audience is a skill that needs to be acquired to become a better content marketer. 

Once you know how to generate content ideas, you need to plan how to create a long-term content strategy. It is a well-known fact that long-term content always does better in SERPs. Properly identifying your goals and plans will help you to create better contents easily. 

You also need a content creation framework. This will help you to have a proper process that is not only writing and publishing content. You will be able to identify the scopes of campaigns, setting a timeline, assigning tasks correctly to the responsible individuals inside your company. 

Once you have your content framework ready, you need to learn how to become a better writer. Remember, poor writing pieces may damage the reputation of your organization completely. 

Next, you need to learn how to create contents for repurposing. Many successful content marketers create content that can be recycled and used for different formats. This is a strong content marketing strategy as this extend the value of your content. 

Once you know how to repurpose and publish your contents on different platforms, you need to know how to promote your content effectively. You must have a solid promotion strategy to increase the reach of your content. Successful content marketers spend more time promoting their content than actually creating the content. You must spend 40% of your time in creating the content and 60% of your time in promoting that. 

Now, you need to measure and analyze your content’s performance. You must know how your content is performing. There is no point in creating content if you don’t know how they are working for your purpose. 

To cope up with the ever-changing landscape of the digital market, you need to eye for new opportunities and keep yourself creative. It is not necessary that what is working today will work tomorrow as well. So, you need to out-perform your competitors and take the lead. 

In the next post, we will discuss all of these processes more in details. 

Understanding the concept of content marketing

Crafting content for a business requires a lot of time and work. Any project management demands a proper framework and so does content marketing. Whether you are planning to create content for a new product or for buyer engagement, a proper framework will reduce a lot of workloads. 

From creating a long-term content plan to mapping keywords to distributing your content, all can become laborious and complicated. However, it doesn’t have to. Find long tails keywords using KWFinder tool. Log tails keywords do wonder to your content to rank higher on search engines. 

According to HubSpot content creation experts, to create your content much smoother and rewarding, your content creation framework must follow these three key factors:

•   Repeatable 
•   Organized
•   Agile

When you have a long-term content creation plan, you do not have to reinvent the wheel for every piece. You should have a clear and repeatable process that will allow you to create blogs, e-books, webinar, etc. in an efficient manner.

Any content creation framework must have an organized structure that will allow you to break larger goals into digestible chunks. This way you will be able to concentrate on a shorter chapter while keeping the end goal in mind. 

Now, to keep your content repeatable and organized, it must be agile and flexible to allow any organizational changes in the coming months. Your content must adjust to your organization’s campaigns, personas, and timelines. 

How to build a killer content creation framework? 

Now, as you know why a framework is useful for your content creation plan, it is the time to know how to create a framework. 

A proper content creation framework contains the following key factors. 

•   Conceptualizing your content
•   Setting your timeline and planning
•   Creating a workflow
•   Reviewing content
•   Publishing and promotion
•   Internal organization 
•   Analyze the results

To conceptualize your content, you must come up with your topic ideas at first. You can use the topic generating tools or can follow the sales questions or follow the trend of your buyer’s persona. Closely follow what they are looking for over the internet, dig into social media platforms, follow Quora to find what people are talking about in your niche and generate content accordingly.

To find and analyze the best keywords for your website, you can use tools like SEMRush.

Make sure to create content for every stage of your buyer’s journey. It is a must-have strategy according to the concept of content marketing.

It is important to concentrate on the timeline of your content. When planning for a short-term content, try to create two to three content offers that you want to offer. That can be in the form of Webinar, E-book or a series of articles.

Also, you need to consider whether the offers are going to target the awareness or decision stage of your buyer’s journey. To focus on your weekly content activities, you must have a plan and idea when to offer which type of content. 

Now, once you know your content plan and ready with the timeline, you must create a workflow to find who on your team is doing what and when. Identify the influencers who are going to contribute to your content strategy. 

Most of the time we don’t review what are we doing and what we have done. Reviewing the entire content plan and strategy before publishing the content is a must. Find out if there are more opportunities or allow multiple rounds of edits. Determine the editing timeline. Keep everything documented to track every change and editing progress. An SEO specialist can be handy and useful to review, edit and update your content. 

Once you are done with the content creation and editing, it is the time to publish and promote your content. Nobody can just publish content and wait for visitors to come and read it. Promotion must be an integral part of your entire content creation framework. Promoting content on multiple channels like emails, social media, paid advertisements, etc. are some best practices to bring in more traffic. 

Organize your files and other documents related to just created content in a secured place or the in the CMS platform you use. This part is known as an internal organization. These documents can become handy if after a few weeks or months you want to update reuse or repurpose your content. 

Analyze and measure your results to get more insights into your content creation framework. Find out what is bringing in traffic and what type of content is doing good and what type is lagging behind. You can remodel your content creation framework according to the results.