Do you want to make sure that your content marketing strategy is following the success funnel?
A funnel that most high-performing content marketing campaigns are following?
This article is for you. This is how to maximize your effort at every stage of the content marketing process.
Many content marketers just jump into content creation and start publishing it on their channels.
Many people start by curating content, then publishing it on their channels in hope to sell things, becuase they were told Content marketing works well for affiliate blogs.
This is more like shooting an arrow in the dark with hopes it will hit the target.
Rather than relying on your gut feeling and starting with content, it is better to do research about your market and what type of content they like to consume. The ideal Content Marketing Process that has been working for me, as well as many other well-known brands, has the following stages:
- Research
- Planning and Creation
- Content Calendar
- Distribution
- Performance and Analysis
1) Content Research
Understand who your audience is, and formulate a content strategy that can help you engage them. First, conduct thorough customer research:
a) Analyze customers’ online behavior and interaction with your website
b) Conduct surveys, polls, quizzes, etc
d) Monitor your social media audience
e) Check customer complains, feedback and suggestions
Define your customer avatar:
2) Content Marketing Planning & Creation
Set realistic and time-bound goals. Identify KPIs to measure those goals. Create customer personas for the best results. Select a tone of voice and maintain that throughout your content. Choose the type of content that best matches the personas of your customers and create marketing funnels.
Brainstorm ideas and start creating content for your target audience. Start by finding relevant topics and keywords.
a) Use tools like BuzzSumo or Google Keyword Planner
b) Find trending keywords for your industry or niche
c) Create a list of topics for your content pieces.
3) Content Calendar
Be more active on social media and content communities to capture the ideas for your own content marketing plan. Assign it to your employees or you can hire content curators from the outside. Establish a workflow to ensure a smooth content creation process. Start creating content according to a routine that you can manage in the long run. Use tools and apps for the effective management of tasks and team members.
a) Select the platforms where you see your target audience most active and start publishing your content there.
b) Cross-promote the same content on all your channels so you deliver the same message to all your audience.
c) Assure that you have a content calendar in place, and content is getting uploaded at the right time.
d) Since each platform has its limits, you can make certain customizations to your content for each platform.
4) Content Distribution
Just publishing the content and sitting back isn’t how you do it. You need to promote it too or you will be left behind the game. Most well-going businesses have teams who are doing this, so either you would need to be more productive about it, or you would need to hire someone who is good at it.
a) Promote your content, blog links, on your social media profiles, and groups
b) Make sure you have optimized your blog posts for search engines that will get you more organic traffic.
c) Share your content on other popular sites such as Reddit, Medium, Quora, etc
d) Never miss email marketing. Maintain a good pool of subscribers for recurring results.
e) Guest Posting still works. Write useful articles and post them on relevant High Authority sites.
5) Content Performance Analysis
Measuring performance will lead you to better results with Content Marketing. It helps you in formulating your future content marketing strategy. Use Social Media analytics tools to analyze your social media content. Leverage Google Analytics to analyze your website’s content. Look at the predefined KPIs to see if you met your own established goals. Understand what type of content is bringing engagements and do more of it. Identify areas for improvement.
a) Focus more on platforms that are performing well.
b) Stop creating content that does not work for your audience
c) Experiment with the new content types and content formats that you haven’t tried yet.
These are some of the practical points that have been helping me and I believe it would work great for you as well. Give it your best shot and share your opinion.