An introduction to Content Marketing

Denise Davies, founder of dsquared, shares her quick guide to effective content marketing.

As a strategic marketing tool, content marketing is an opportunity for your brand to engage and resonate with your target audience.   Done right, it will help to drive profitable customer action – and position your company as a thought leader in its field.

At this point, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just blogs and social media. However, good content marketing is more than that – providing insightful content can help build a lasting relationship between your brand and customers, helping you grow your business over time.

Here’s a short guide to the key steps you should consider.

Set your objectives

Are you trying to drive more web traffic to your site? Increase enquiries on a particular service? Hoist your website up the Google rankings? Or perhaps you’re looking to build your database of prospects?

Ensure you have a clear idea of your goals and the steps required to achieve them. Be sure to consider the frequency of your content creation, as well as the resource available for your campaign – as it’s vital that your content is published regularly. It can be beneficial to bring in a specialist copywriter, video editor or social media manager to assist with your project to help you achieve your goals.

Know your audience

Without knowing what your audience is searching for, it’s difficult to tailor your content to their needs. Do your research ahead of time and understand the key search terms people are using to find your website. You can then begin to segment your audience into distinct buyer personas – a research-based profile that depicts your target customer.

What are your customer’s ‘pain points’? What do they find interesting? Pay close attention to key analytics from your website, such as the number of unique users and the bounce rate on specific pages, as well as the level of interactions and shares your content is achieving on social media. These will help you work out which pieces of content resonate best, so that you can plan out future content to meet their needs.

Get creative

The beauty of content marketing is that it can be done in a myriad of ways. Creativity is the name of the game here, and it can be extremely beneficial to plan out. Whether your content is a blog post, video, infographic, podcasts, white paper or case study, it needs to be timely, relevant and insightful.

We’ve established that the content you create and distribute should be valuable and relevant enough to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, but it also needs to be consistent.

Content should be published regularly and with the same tone of voice and branding throughout. It’s often said that prospects need to see a brand several times before they can recall it – and regular publication helps to cement your brand in their minds.

Grow your contact list

Another benefit of content marketing is that your work is hosted on channels that you own, such as your website or social media.

You can create ‘gated content’ which sits on a specific landing page. This could be for a specific report or white paper, only accessible once your prospects have entered their contact details in exchange for a download file. This allows you to build your database of prospects and gives you a snapshot of what they are concerned with as part of your opening interaction.

A variety of customer relationship management (CRM) tools can help you keep track and monitor interactions, with gated content enabling sales teams to follow up with prospects and turn them into clients.

Measure your success

It’s no use publishing a well-written blog or spectacular image gallery if there’s no one tracking its performance online. With a tight focus on the objectives you outlined in step one, check your campaign against the goals to gauge its success. What went well? What perhaps needs more work? What could you do differently next time?

Of course, your measurement criteria will vary depending on the objectives you’ve set. If the goal was to increase traffic to your site, it would be prudent to examine the number of unique users – as well as returning users – using a tool such as Google Analytics. If you want to improve the ranking of your webpages on Google or other search engines, you’ll want to ensure your webpages are populated with regularly updated content and full of search engine optimisation (SEO)-friendly keywords.

Whichever objective you’ve chosen, it’s important to evaluate your work, recalibrate your goals and consistently improve!

Content marketing is an excellent opportunity for you to communicate the value of your brand (and the expertise of your team) in a far more subtle way than sending prospects a shouty marketing email. It’s a massive opportunity for you to establish a lasting and beneficial relationship with prospects and clients alike.

For more information on content marketing and how it can support your marketing strategy, get in touch with me at denise@dsqmarketing.com

Denise