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So, you’ve heard marketers across all industries reiterating the importance of content, “content is king,” and “content will drive more leads and sales,” they claim, yet you’re still to notice any great results?

Don’t throw in the towel just yet, as we’ve put together the ultimate content marketing guide to answer your most pressing questions: what exactly is content marketing? How will it impact your business and customers? And how can you implement an effective strategy? 

Continue reading to avoid wasting your time on the wrong approach, and learn how to use content marketing effectively to reach your customers and grow your business.

Let’s dive into our comprehensive content marketing guide for beginners. 

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a powerful digital marketing strategy that involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined target audience. 

The goal is to drive profitable customer action by building trust and authority with your audience. Clearly, the role content plays in your inbound marketing strategy is huge.

The content you create can be in written, audible, or visual design - think blog posts, infographics, podcasts, videos, and so on.  

These days, content marketing is one of the best ways to raise brand awareness and build online authority, relevant web traffic, and high-quality leads. But to reap these benefits, you can’t just create content for the sake of it, nor can you publish a thin piece of content and hope your target audience finds it. 

Remember, with the sea of information available online to consumers, if you want to drive desired results to your business, customers, digital marketing strategy, and ROI, you need to have the right strategy and tactics in place.

So, where do you begin? Here are some steps to help you create successful content.

Define Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is arguably the most crucial step in your content marketing strategy - and it's where you should begin.

Your target audience refers to the specific people most likely to want your product or service. In other words, they are the people with a problem your business can solve and, therefore, the people who should see your marketing campaigns and efforts. 

By understanding the demographics, interests, needs, and pain points of your target audience, you'll be able to craft content that will effectively address the needs and wants of your customers, resonate with them, and increase your chances of success. 

So, if you haven't properly defined your target audience, now is the time; otherwise, your efforts will be in vain. 

P.S. this applies to all digital marketing efforts. For example, lead generation campaigns and Social Media also need a defined target audience to be successful. 

Identify Your Brand’s Unique Value Proposition (UVP)

Equally important as understanding your audience is knowing your product or service inside and out. 

After all, how can you create killer content if you don't know what you're marketing, nor the unique benefits that set you apart from the competition? 

With that in mind, now's the moment to identify your UVP or statement that clearly communicates the value customers can expect to receive from your product or service.

To do this, consider what sets you apart, what value you offer, and how it specifically addresses the needs and pain points of potential customers. Keep in mind this doesn't have to be long; a sentence or two will suffice. 

Once identified, you can use the UVP to communicate your value in your content marketing process. Doing so is essential for differentiating your brand from the competition, creating tailored content for your audience, boosting customer loyalty, increasing brand awareness, and driving sales. 

Conduct Keyword Research

These days, creating content that isn't optimized for search engines is pointless. SEO is all the rage - and your competition knows it too. 

So, why not level the playing field?

To do this, you'll need to conduct keyword research to identify the phrases and words potential customers are searching for when looking for products and services like yours.

You can turn to tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and other similar platforms in your research efforts. These tools will provide you with a list of relevant keywords and phrases, along with metrics such as search volume, competition, and CPC. 

Once identified, you can optimize your website or content by including those keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, and on-page content. 

Doing this will improve your website's visibility in search engine results, increase website traffic, and lead to higher conversions. Win-win. 

Create a Content Calendar

Can you start creating content at this point? Sure! 

But to maximize your success, ensure your content is aligned with business goals, and generate increased engagement and traffic, a content calendar is the way to go. 

This type of calendar can be created in several ways, such as using a spreadsheet, a project management tool, or even a physical calendar. You do you! 

Besides planning ahead, a calendar lets you set deadlines for creation, publication, and promotion helps keep you organized and on track, and allows you to identify and plan for any potential gaps in content. What's more, you'll be able to coordinate your content with any upcoming promotions, events, or product launches, ensuring that all your efforts are aligned. 

Content & SEO Go Hand-In-Hand

You're officially ready to create content! Ensure you're creating a variety of types to appeal to and engage different segments of your target audience. This can be anything from blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, podcasts, social media posts, and e-books to whitepapers, webinars, case studies, and more. 

Each type of content can be used to achieve different goals, such as educating, entertaining, informing, or persuading. For example, blog posts are great for educating, while videos are more effective for entertaining and engaging. 

What about SEO?

By now, we know how important SEO is for increasing visibility and driving more organic traffic to your website and sales. 

And the same is applied to the content you create. As previously mentioned, optimizing for SEO increases the likelihood of your content appearing in search engine results when potential customers search for keywords related to your business. 

So, what are the steps?

• Using relevant keywords, as previously discussed.
• Creating high-quality, informative, and well-written content that provides value to the user
• Incorporating internal and external links to other relevant pages on your website or from other websites.
• Using alt tags to describe images and videos in your content
• Ensuring that your website's technical structure, such as the URLs and navigation, is easy for search engines to crawl.

Measure and Analyze Your Results

Analyzing your content marketing results is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your efforts and making data-driven decisions to improve them. 

But with so many different types of content produced, measuring the impact of your content can seem daunting. 

Don't worry. If you have your content KPIs in place and a few tools up your sleeve, you'll be able to effectively measure your efforts and, most importantly, gauge if they are smashing your goals. 

Obviously, this isn't as simple as looking at a metric and calling it a day; you'll need to determine which type of content is making waves with your target audience, which channels are bringing the most traffic, which form of content works best at which stage of the buyers' journey, and much more. 

Some metrics for you to consider: 

• Traffic - the number of unique visitors and most visited pages on your site. Turn to UTM parameters to unlock a treasure trove of information.
• Engagement - look at metrics, such as the number of likes, shares, comments, and click-throughs on your content.
• Conversions - this is the number of visitors who take a desired action, such as filling out a form or making a purchase.
• Revenue - the revenue generated from your content marketing efforts. 

Once you've identified the most relevant metrics for each content piece and set goals, you can turn to Google Analytics to start tracking. 

With all your information, you're ready to make data-driven decisions regarding your current and future content. 

Final Note

At the end of the day, creating successful content may not be as easy as it seems on paper. But with a strategic marketing approach, a deep understanding of your target audience, and the right content marketing tools, you'll be able to craft killer content that truly resonates with your audience, boosts brand awareness, and drives sales, conversions, and ROI. 

Remember, put yourself in your audiences' shoes when creating content, as a customer-centric approach is always the way to go. Analyze your efforts, experiment with different strategies and content styles to optimize your performance, and always plan ahead. 

Want to learn other strategies that our content marketing guide didn't cover? Reach out to our experts today. With our tailored approach, we can create content that truly stands out in today's crowded digital landscape and aligns with your business goals.

Reach out to us today for a free consultation call.