What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Why do Content Marketing?

As a growth marketing agency content marketing is a fundamental activity for ourselves and for our clients. It forms an important part of our own sales funnel. We develop a mix of content and subsequent campaigns that engage with our target audience at each stage of the funnel, for example.

Step 1: Align your content marketing with the stages of the sales funnel

Steps for a Perfect Content Marketing Strategy.

1. Content marketing strategy goals.

What is the point of all this content marketing? To create content for each stage of the funnel

• Create content which works best for generating awareness
• Create content which works best for bringing in leads
• Create content which works best to generate conversions

2. Develop a content marketing strategy for your target personas.

Who are you creating content for? Identify and profile your target audience personas.

• Determine what types and range of content (e.g. videos, podcasts, guides) are going to resonate best with your target personas
• What subject areas are of value and interest to your target audience? What are their pain points and needs?
• Check out what the monthly search volumes for the subject area you are creating content for and this will give you an indication of interest level
• Define the tone and messaging that will engage with your target audiences
• What are the best channels, platforms and activities to reach your target? Paid Facebook Ads? Paid Linkedln Ads? Google Search Ads? Emails? Etc

3. Undertake an audit of your existing content marketing assets.

It’s useful to list them or map them out. Do you have content that could be repurposed?

4. Undertake a Content Marketing Matrix.

This will identify the purpose of each content.  Learn more about this by reading our content marketing matrix blog post.

5. Expand your pool of content marketing assets.

This is to ensure you have a range of content that can be used to take people through the sales funnel. Make sure you have enough variety of content formats to reach people in different ways. Top tip: “According to a report from HubSpot Research, more than 50% of consumers want to see videos from brands…more than any other type of content.”

6. Identify your resource requirements for content marketing.

What content and content formats can you realistically pull together? Do you have the necessary resource, tools and skill in-house to execute a content marketing plan?

7. Be Brand Focused With Your Content Marketing.

• What do you want to be known and recognised for? lnfographics, video explainers, quirky social media posts, guides, reports, podcasts
• How do your content marketing assets distinguish you from the competition?
• Is your content reflecting your brand values? It should do, as this will help you to reinforce and position your brand

8. Define the channels and activities you will use to get your content out there.

9. Map out a few potential user journeys that aim to take a potential buyer through the different stages of the sales funnel.

Step 2.

Develop a content plan which  determines the channels and activities you should use to deliver your content marketing to your target personas. This is essentially the marketing and promotion of your beautiful new asset!  For each individual piece of content marketing create a marketing campaign plan which will ensure you get the absolute maximum you can from one piece of content – what are you going to do with your content now?

Step 3 – Plan a marketing campaign.

We are going to use this Guide as l piece of content to create an entire campaign with an associated set of assets and other content marketing types which we will then use to execute the campaign across a variety of channels and platforms.

How to create a marketing campaign out of your content marketing asset – insiders insight!

Turning a single piece of content marketing into a beautifully crafted campaign.

For the purposes of creating a working example we are going to use this Guide itself to show you how we as a growth marketing agency are taking this piece of content as part of our own content marketing strategy. We will use it to reach our own target audiences and using it as a basis (asset) to craft a marketing campaign which ties in with our own strategic marketing plans and follows methodology of the sales funnel.

Step 1 – Devise a campaign brief.

Step 2 – Deconstruct the guide into multiple valuable content marketing assets.

Once you have the completed piece of content and its accompanying assets, what should do with it….. well market it of course!

Once you have the completed piece of content and its accompanying assets, what should do with it….. well market it of course!

Step 3 – Marketing your content – the basics!

There are some obvious things we can do with this guide using a variety of channels and activities.

Step 4 – Devise a whole marketing campaign.

With some creative thinking there is more, so much more that can be done. Many of the elements and content within this guide can now be used to create other types of engaging marketing content, in particular for social. Here’s some examples of what we could do over a course of 6-8 weeks, now that the guide and its accompanying assets are complete:

• Pull out the Contact Marketing Strategy Top10 Tips and turn it into an10 page carousel booklet to publish on social as a mini booklet with a link back to the full guide
• Pull out the Contact Marketing Strategy Top10 Tips and turn it into a checklist Image to publish on social with a link back to the full guide
• Pull out the Contact Marketing Strategy Top10 Tips and turn it into a video to publish on social with a link back to the full guide
• Pull out the Contact Marketing Strategy Top10 Tips and turn it into an infographlc to publish on social with a link back to the full guide
• create a video for social with 5 slides highlighting the key aspects of this guide and what a reader would learn
• use a quote to create an Image featuring the quote and post on social with some commentary in the post and a link back to the guide
• use a statistic(s) to create an Image featuring the stat and post on social with some commentary in the post and a link back to the guide  -90% of marketers using content marketing plan to continue investing the same amount in the channel in 2022
• use the Content Marketing Matrix infographic for social postings to engage the audience about content market

Other Activity.

• Email Marketing: send the Guide to our email subscribers as a feature piece
• Google Display Ads: create a range of responsive display ad sizes to market the guide
• SEO: optimise the guide for SEO for our chosen keyword and place it on the content marketing services page of our website as supporting and relevant contenting strategies