Four pillars of effective content marketing: Understand the profile of who you want to consume your content. Make your content meaningful, useful and interesting. The primary goal of content marketing is to connect potential customers to a brand, product, or service through a variety of content-driven initiatives. A content marketing strategy should always start with the target audience in mind.
In marketing jargon, they're called people (or buyers for B2B). In others, define specific profiles for the core groups in your audience with whom you want to interact. The second pillar of content marketing planning is to define conversion funnels and key performance indicators so that you can measure success. The third pillar of content marketing planning is to define a content strategy that helps you plan what relevant content you need to produce, how often you should publish it, and on which platforms you want to distribute it.
The first pillar of content strategy is “space”. In other words, you must determine what space you want to own in relation to the content. This is different from defining your positioning strategy and is also different from determining your value proposition. Positioning and value proposition refer to the solution you offer.
However, the “space” you want to have has to do with the problems your target market is facing. You want to be known as a company that knows the problem and its related solutions well. You want to provide thought leadership, ideas and education. Think about the problem your potential customer is having and brainstorm how you can add value through your content; then let them know and, therefore, “own that space”.
You almost certainly have a lot of content available. That content is currently stuck in the heads of the smartest people in your company. The trick is to get that content out of their heads; that's called “Production”. Production is the second pillar of your content strategy.
Sometimes, your opinion leaders can write in a clear, effective, and engaging way. But more often than not, opinion leaders need help with that production. Not only do they need an easy way to get information out of their heads, but they also need someone who can take that information and turn it into a compelling, coherent message. The key to this production model is to make it extremely easy to get the raw material out, whether through an interview, drafting documents, creating an outline, etc.
If you're dedicated to a content strategy, it's very likely that you're so focused on content development that you've missed out on one of the best opportunities for content strategy: the reuse of content. Content reuse is when the raw material discussed above is taken and presented in a different way. For example, when you interview an opinion leader, your goal is to create raw material. Often, someone already has a specific delivery in mind for that raw content.
It could be a blog post, a presentation, or an article, but it's usually just one of those things, rather than all of them. This is where content reuse comes into play. If it's a long blog post, it could be reused in several smaller blog posts. Create images to help tell the story.
Why? Because images are what create readers and increase sharing. These images, together with the text of the blog post, can be converted into a presentation. That presentation can be converted to a voice-over video. That video with a voiceover can be turned into a podcast, etc.
The point here is that you should put as much energy into reusing as you do into creating the original content. You may feel that producing content is sufficient and that, once published, the content will be found. You have to promote that content and make it visible. Promotion is not difficult; what is difficult is discipline around promotion.
Using the example of the raw material that was converted into a blog post and then reused, here are some ways to think about promoting that content. Yes, well, you can promote your posts through social media as much as you want, but they will most likely be largely ignored. Unless you're a celebrity or a major brand, social media can be an infuriating experience. Simply tweeting with a few hashtags won't make much difference if you're a small business with limited customer interaction.
In fact, you can have the opposite effect by annoying your customers with your endless promotion on social media. Content calendars keep your strategy online and ensure that you research, formulate and distribute content without delay. Only 33% of brands have a documented content marketing strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute. By integrating the four pillars of content into your overall marketing, you can attract potential customers to your offer, build a relationship with them, and persuade them to buy.
Remember that strong content pillars establish your brand as an authority on topics that interest your objectives, so focus on finding common ground. The first pillar of content marketing planning is to understand your audience, where they're most likely to interact with your content, and what problem they need to solve. Content optimization is the phase that deals with optimizing content to help you reach a wide audience. This means that the people who select your content today will pay attention to the content you produce in the future.
Once they cover the basic content of the utilities and become customers, they may want to connect with their brand and be informed while they are entertained (one of the challenges of producing a combination of content and managing social media channels). Good content marketing starts with a desire to educate and progresses by establishing a relationship with your potential customers and demonstrating value by offering them the right forms of content based on their position in the buying process. The best marketing content includes blog posts, infographics, website copies, and other types of content that can raise awareness. Addressing your content strategy by taking advantage of these four pillars will increase the impact of your thought leadership and help you achieve your marketing goals.
The four central pillars of content marketing in digital marketing suggest Bill Gates' famous quote from 1996: “Content is king. . .
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