For your marketing efforts to be effective, your content needs to bring people to a place where they perform an action that leads to you selling your product or service at a profit. Content marketing, therefore, is a marketing strategy that targets potential and existing customers with exactly the right content on the right platforms in the right format.
How to develop your content marketing strategy
Marketing in today’s fast-paced world with ever-changing trends and technologies can be a challenge, but it needn’t be overwhelming. Here are five quick steps to developing content that creates sales and therefore profits.
- Decide who your target audience is, you can make a decision about this by looking at your current clients’ demographics.
- Consider the time, effort and budget you have available to your content marketing activities. If it’s limited, you may decide to target one audience at a time.
- Next, plan the content. Are you trying to create an awareness of your product, educate, facilitate a transaction, or build loyalty with existing customers? The “why” behind your marketing will determine the gist of the message.
- Choose the platform. When you know who you’re targeting and why, choosing the platform and the format is easy! For example, if you’re targeting potential clients in order to create an awareness of your product, you know to create a short video of the problem your product solves and host it on YouTube. Also don’t try to do too much too soon, choose one or two platforms and focus all your efforts there before expanding.
- Create the content! Read more about Digital Marketing and what to consider.
How to grow your content organically
Effective content marketing not only increases your reach, it also helps your content grow organically:
- The more of your content that’s out there, the more likely it is to be shared.
- When readers see good quality content associated with your brand, you establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
- Once published, it can live forever, creating backlinks that search engines love.
Content marketing doesn’t require a huge budget to start. It also adds to your bottom line by saving you the time and effort of constantly creating new content; simply reformat the content that you already have for different audiences. For example, turn a blog post into downloadable PDF, a slideshow or a video to instantly expand your reach.
It’s as easy as that!
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