Content Marketing 101: How to Create Marketing Strategy in 2020?
As Gary Vaynerchuk says, ‘Businesses need to start thinking like media houses.’ Well, given the fact that more people are coming online to do research before making a purchasing decision, the value of content creation and distribution is paramount.
Your ability to create content that speaks to your target audience at the right time and at the right place can bring you an unprecedented amount of online success. Therefore, it is important for you to realise how crucial content is for your business success in 2020.
Not just that, your ability to distribute the content online and promote it to satisfy your various business goals is important as well. And, this is exactly what we are going to discuss in this guide.
We are going to share everything that is related to content marketing and help you understand the importance of creating a content marketing strategy for your business. So, without wasting any more time, let’s get into the content!
What is Content Marketing?
We all know how traditional marketing is becoming less and less relevant by each day. As a modern marketer, you should always be in search of better marketing strategies. And content marketing is one of them.
So, what exactly is content marketing? Well, content marketing is a strategic approach to creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content online in order to draw the attention of a target audience to the products and services being promoted. Content marketing strategies are geared towards making your target audience to take actions that will be profitable for your business.
One of the basic principles of content marketing is to provide relevant, valuable and consistent content to your prospects instead of bombarding them with online sales pitches. Let’s discuss why exactly you should invest in content marketing for your small business.
Benefits of Content Marketing for Small Businesses
There are many benefits of content marketing in 2020. We are going to discuss some of the most important ones in this section.
1. Better Brand Recognition
Content marketing is definitely one of the most effective online marketing strategies that can make your brand stand out. Since the market is quickly becoming more and more mature and saturated, it has become important for brands to evolve their customer outreach.
In other words, they have to make sure they come up with content that connects them with their target audience and gives them an opportunity to make highly informed purchasing decisions.
Delivering high quality, relevant content on a consistent basis can help you build trust with your target audience. This will eventually help you establish yourself as an authority in the market.
2. Increased Search Engine Traffic
Content marketing gives you a huge opportunity to boost Your search engine traffic. The more you invest in content marketing, the more you will be able to drive traffic from organic sources like search engines and social media sites.
The reason behind this is the large amount of content that you will be creating in your content marketing campaign. Creating high-quality content on a regular basis will provide you more room for long-tail keyword integration.
The keywords will help you rank higher in major search engines that will reward you with higher organic traffic. All you need to do is be persistent and consistent with your content marketing strategies.
3. Enhanced Social Media Reach
One of the basic human behaviors is to share relevant things with their network. If people find something that is valuable and relevant to them, they will go on to share it with their network of people.
This makes content marketing a great weapon to establish yourself on social media. When you create content that satisfies your target audience’s needs or solves their problems, they will not think twice before sharing it on social media platforms they use.
This will have a trickle-down effect on their network as people will also want to consume and engage with the content. Eventually, even they will end up sharing the content. Therefore, content marketing can help you grow your social media reach quicker than you can ever imagine.
4. More Credibility
Brands need to always be on the top of their content game if they want to showcase their expertise in a particular subject. Audiences always go with brands that create highly relevant content that reflects their competency.
For example, you can start your own online blog where you can share your knowledge with your audience and in the process create content that can help them solve their problems.
Creating content that showcases how a particular product or service is better than that of your competitors can really help you build authority in the market. Content marketing, therefore, helps you educate, entertain, and establish your expertise or credibility.
5. Increased Conversions
There is no reason to run content marketing campaigns if it doesn’t bring you the conversions you want. When it comes to content marketing and creating content for your website, especially your blog, you will have to take a few things into consideration.
First of all, you have to understand that your target audience is going to consume the content of your website or blog when they are in the research stage of the buying journey. They will land on your website or blog because they are looking for answers to their questions.
Secondly, you need to curate your content in a way that helps these visitors find what they are looking for. In other words, you will have to create content that simply addresses their problems. The more you are able to convince them about the credibility of your solutions, the more they will be likely to convert from researcher to paying customer.
6. Creating a Brand Personality
Content marketing gives you a chance to get closer to your target audience. It does that by helping you create a personality that is more relatable to your audience. Content marketing allows you to be approachable as it helps you to use a friendly and conversational tone. The more you are consistent with that tone of your content, the more it will help you create a consistent brand personality.
How to Create Content Marketing Strategy in 2020?
To create a content marketing strategy that works in 2020, you can refer to this section as we will share 7 steps you can follow to reach your content marketing goals. Let’s discuss the steps in detail.
1. Create SMART Content Marketing Goals
SMART goals are nothing but objectives that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound. It is important that your content marketing goals have these qualities so that you can establish a strong foundation for your content marketing plan. Even if you had a content marketing goal before reading this post, you must bring changes in it to make it SMART.
2. Know Your Target Audience
To create a strong content marketing strategy, you will have to understand who you are trying to market, and where exactly you will find them. Apart from knowing the age, gender, income, location, and education of your target audience, you will also have to figure out:
a) Their internet hangout
b) Their go-to social media platform
c) Their pain points
d) Their likes and dislikes
e) Kind of content they trust
A better understanding of your target audience will give you an opportunity to enhance your content marketing strategy.
3. Audit Your Current Content and Market Position
To reach your content marketing objectives, you will have to first understand where you exactly stand. Conduct a complete audit of your current content marketing strategies to know how exactly you can improve them. Figure out what your competitors are up to. Check the results of your past content and see how you can manipulate it to make it more usable.
4. Write Your Content Guidelines
It is important to have consistency in your content. This can only be achieved when you establish ground rules for your content marketing plans. Figure out what kind of tone you want in your content. Pen down the kind of images you will want to add to your content. Lastly, you will want to know what kind of content you want to produce for your target audience. The different types of content are:
a) Blog Posts
b) eBooks
c) Case Studies
d) Templates
e) Infographics
f) Videos
g) Podcasts
h) Social Media Content
5. Brainstorm for Content Ideas
While you brainstorm for content ideas with your team, you should always take help from content Idea tools and also watch What kind of content your competitors are publishing online. You should go through the leading websites in your industry to see how you can create better content than them.
6. Measure Your Content Marketing Progress
Lastly, you must track your content marketing progress with the help of tools like Google Analytics so that you are able to quantify the performance of your content marketing campaign. Remember, the ‘M’ in SMART stood for Measurement.
Wrapping Up
We highly recommend you prioritise your content marketing efforts because the content you are creating for your audience might very well work like a tree that keeps bearing fruits. If you find creating a content marketing strategy a challenging task, feel free to connect with us. Our content marketing expert would love to help you out!