In today’s digital dominated era, where buyers often prioritize online platforms to discover, purchase and partner with other businesses, content marketing serves as an indispensable tool for achieving market leadership and authority. Highly relevant, quality and purposeful content can drive high potential leads, market differentiation and help a business tackle the obstacles of fragmented messaging, inconsistent pipeline development, limited engagement, scalability and poor customer retention.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a content focused strategic marketing model, designed to create and distribute high-value and industry-tailored content in order to increase visibility, profitability, retention, and brand authority. In contrast to traditional advertisement, content marketing focuses expertise, education and thought leadership rather than just overambitious proposals.
Step by Step Framework Develop and Successfully Execute a Content Marketing Strategy
- Define Clear Business Objectives
The development of effective measurement standards (KPI) is dependent on establishing concise business objective criteria primarily. Understanding which business objective an organization is addressing through their content will provide you insights to measure how well a content achieves each of its intended purposes, such as improving quality of leads, shortening sales cycle, increasing brand authority, etc.
- Understand Your Target Audience
Successful content creation requires understanding the target segment of audience and decision makers. Creating a comprehensive profile detailing aspects of your target decision makers i.e. job title, duties, pain points, purchasing motivation, etc., will enable marketers to find, create or content types that can assist in addressing questions as b2b collaborations moves through their buying process.
- Audit Existing Content
Conducting an evaluation of your previously created content helps analyze the existing gaps and what performs well. By enabling the user responses to determine the expectations of the audience, beyond the traditional measures like geography, pain points and buying triggers will support organizations to eliminate producing negative outcomes that may lead to missed opportunities. Invest in measuring the quality of the content, relevance to target segment, how much it resonate the buyer’s expectations. Based on the evaluation findings, marketers can proceed with further adjustments or strategic improvements to optimize its value.
- Identify Content Pillars and Themes
The content themes you create should focus the business’s core theme based on the knowledge and expertise a company has in the industry domain. Content pillars are the themes that will guide marketing campaigns, and help establish a brand as a thought leader in the current market. Ensure that the content themes should provide a balanced presentation including educational, industry insights and product or service-related information in order to serve the various needs of your audience segment.
- Choose the Right Content Formats and Channels
Certain formats and channels can outperform others. Selecting the right formats of the content, whether its blog posts, eBooks, webinars, videos, podcasts most appropriate for your audience’s preferences, consumption habits and interests. Simultaneously, identifying the right channels (LinkedIn, Email, your Website, Industry Forums) through which you will distribute the content to reach your target segment is substantial. Additionally, organizations need to consider expanding awareness and brand building is more important than merely lead generation. Without visibility, even the right audience can miss the value you offer.
- Plan for Content Governance and Workflow
A structured governance model, a content marketing team can ensure consistent quality for the promotions that are made available to customers in a timely manner. In order to achieve this, define roles and responsibilities for all facets from content creation and editing to approval. An editorial Calendar is essential and should include dates, voicing style, guidelines and compliance standards to ensure consistency in the brand voice and messaging.
- Develop a Measurement and Optimization Framework
Implement clearly identified metrics to understand your content’s performance based on business results. Metrics may include but are not limited to factors such as engagement, conversion, pipeline influence and account level impact. Leverage this insights to help the management system to optimize the topics, the content formats and how it will be distributed, ensures that every draft has a measurable and meaningful value to your business.
- Budget and Resource Allocation
With a solid strategic plan, enables marketers to allocate resources in an optimal way to improve efficiency. By determining the balance of internal vs external production, identifying your highest priority initiatives that will create the most impact. In addition, embedding technology tools in content creation for speed, quality and scalability will enable for sustained content operations irrespective of budget or business size.
- Build Integration Across Teams
Content marketing works best when there is an engaged and synchronized collaboration between sales, product development, IT and marketing operations teams. Alignment between organizational teams and buyer objections will support developing highly influential and market relevant content. When your content pipeline is aligned, it supports account-based marketing, sales enablement and customer awareness. Establishing a cross functional feedback loop is a currency to continuously drive content that is customer-centric, service-oriented and solely focused on ROI requirements.
Conclusion
The important step to successful content marketing strategy is establishing clarity of objectives, understanding the target markets, auditing current assets, and creating a structured framework for implementation. Beyond an executional function, organizations need to prioritize content marketing as a strategic growth engine in order to achieve scalable growth in a swiftly evolving market.
In an environment of rivalry, content marketing is more than just a medium of brand communication, it is a powerful lever for differentiation, establishing credibility, and establishing a positive business impact. By leveraging a strategy as a baseline, businesses can directly align the content marketing goals with initiatives driving long-term ROI.
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