Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and

distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined

audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

When done correctly, this helps create a relationship with your audience, which leads to trust. And when your audience members trust you, they’re more willing to do business with you when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.

To communicate with your audience, you need to produce content. Content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

Your content should attract the right people to your site, engage those people into leads, and

nurture and help close them into customers. But it doesn’t stop there. Your content should also delight your customers and turn them into promoters of your brand.

The Power of Storytelling

Everyone loves a great story. People want to feel connected to a group, to belong. Stories give us a reason to communicate and relate. Stories are stimulating and give us something to believe in. Stories make us feel better, smarter, safer, or even loved. Business storytelling is similar. It’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects and customers.

But telling your brand’s story is more than what you write on your website, your blog, or even

social media. It’s your value, your mission, and how you communicate them consistently to your audience — wherever they are.

Building a Content Creation Framework

A content creation framework is a structure of processes for publishing content — from the

beginning stages to post-publication. With a framework in place, your team can foster creative ideas in an organized, scalable manner. A framework strikes that perfect balance between autonomous creativity and long-term content sustainability.

Planning a Long-term Content Strategy

Planning provides a road map for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical

decisions regarding what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and

when you’ll be publishing it.

With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad hoc content

requests like company initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.

Generating Content Ideas

Humans are always coming up with new ideas. Whether we’re lying in bed, commuting to work, or going for a run, our minds have a seemingly endless ability to generate new ideas.

But as natural and easy as this process might sometimes feel, it gets tricky when your job

depends on it. A content marketer — or any creative, for that matter — doesn’t have the leisure to have an “off day.” Your content ideas fuel your work. Run out of gas, and your content initiatives will stall.

Creating Quality Blog Content Your Audience Loves to Read and Share

Think back to the last blog post you read. Did you skim through it as opposed to reading it

because the introduction didn’t hold your attention? Did the content seem to ramble as opposed to getting to the point? Were you unable to find a helpful next step to continue your journey?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, the author who wrote the blog post probably

didn’t pay close enough attention to the structure of the content. And he or she is suffering the consequences: You, along with many others, stopped reading the post.

All effective blog posts have a blueprint. You might not easily see it, but it’s there, and it’s meant to help you, the reader, through your journey to making a well-informed, confident decision —whatever that decision might be.

Extending the Value of Your Content Through Re-purposing

Imagine you’re a content creator tasked with writing blog posts, content offers, video scripts, and so on as part of your daily job function. That’s a lot of content to create.

Repurposing content allows you to extend the value of your content by changing it to serve a

different purpose, like transforming the messaging of several blog posts to create a guide or

reusing content from your guide to help you create an educational video series. The messaging is the same, but the channel or format in which it’s consumed is different.

Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

If you want to create effective content that converts visitors into leads and eventually customers, you need to create a helpful, positive user experience that solves for both the searcher and the search engine, not just one or the other.

Here’s how you can solve for both: Create targeted clusters of relevant content that each covers a specific topic in depth. These targeted clusters then need to lead to a centralized hub, known as a pillar page. A pillar page (also known as a content pillar or power page) is a website page that covers a specific topic in depth and is linked to a cluster of related content.

Create a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

Thanks to the rise of technology, video is used more widely as a business strategy across

marketing, sales, and service teams. When done correctly, a video marketing strategy is an

effective way to attract, engage, and delight your audience in a human and helpful way.

But creating any old video isn’t enough. You need to create memorable videos that engage your audience.

Building a Guest Blogging Strategy Powered by SEO

Guest blogging is an effective tactic that helps your business in more ways than one. Not only does it help you build authority as a thought leader within your industry, but also, and more importantly, it’s a powerful way to optimize your website for search when done correctly.

Effectively Promote Content

One of the biggest challenges marketers face when creating content is visibility. Creating great content simply isn’t enough. A successful content strategy should include a promotional plan that strategically shares content with the people who will benefit most from it.

Measuring and Analyzing Your Content

There are a ton of metrics out there that you can report on to understand your content’s performance. For a blog post, you might be interested in webpage visitors, time on page, and referral traffic. For a video, maybe you’re more interested in watch time, social media shares, and impressions. And if you’re offering a webinar, landing page conversions for registration might be your top metric. Regardless of what type of content you’re measuring, there are numerous metrics that impact its success.