MAR. 11, 2021
Effective content marketing can result in many benefits, including increased visibility, traffic to your site, and conversions. It can also help build credibility and trust while strengthening your recognition as a brand.
However, sometimes in the race to have content published regularly, marketers forget other crucial content marketing aspects. They forget that quality rather than quantity is the key. Furthermore, there is no need to create content only to meet a publishing schedule. Instead, your aim should be to create content that offers your customers and business value. But how can you, as a marketer, achieve this? You need a content marketing process. It’s a plan that guides you from content ideation to results measurement and optimization.
Let’s look at the essential questions you should ask yourself before creating a content marketing process.
What Outcomes Do You Want from the Content?
Do you want to drive traffic to your site, increase conversions, grow your authority on a topic, or something else? Your content marketing needs a purpose, clear goals that you can work toward achieving and metrics that help you track your performance.
Who Are Your Customers?
To understand your ideal buyer, conduct research to help you determine
- The content that resonates with them
- Their interests and needs
- Their demographics
- The information they search for
- The devices do they use
These questions can help you understand your ideal buyer. Then you can find ways to structure your content in a way that will engage and drive them to action.
How Should You Scale Content?
Your content marketing process needs to be flexible enough to meet the ever-changing customer and market demands. To do this, establish an efficient workflow that helps you produce content fast, and this entails researching high-value, well-performing keywords; writing engaging content that offers value, and marketing and promoting what you write. This brings us to the next question:
What Channels Should You Use to Distribute and Promote Content?
If you don’t distribute and promote your content, no one but your team will see it. There are many options, including blogs, email marketing, social media, third-party distribution channels, pay-per-click, etc. However, your choice of channels should depend on your audience and how they seek information.
How Do You Measure Success?
You can use tools such as Google Analytics or social media analytic tools to determine if your content helped you meet goals. Tracking metrics can also help identify the kind of content that works, the channels that perform better, and areas needing improvement.
But now that you have all this information at hand, how do you structure your content marketing process? The infographic below includes an easy five-step process you can leverage when structuring your content marketing process. Check it out!