Content Marketing Basics

Introduction

Content Marketing is a huge part of digital marketing. When done right, it has the possibility of driving your business through the roof. Content Marketing is not something that can be explained in a few words, it is a process that has lots of different components. In this blog post, you will learn the basics of content marketing and how to effectively do it yourself.

Goals and Objectives

The first step in the Content Marketing process is to create goals for your company. Your goals should be based on where you see yourself in the future. After you have a goal in mind, your content ideas should work towards achieving those goals.

Research and Analysis

After coming up with the goals of your company, you then need to research the type of content you are wanting to create in order to make your content effective and achieve your goals. Here are some different things that you may want to research and or analyze before you start creating content.

Know your site
Know your audience
Find influencers in your industry
Research your competitors content

After you have researched these different things, you will have a better idea of the content that you should create. Knowing your site will allow you to create content that will be compatible and will work well with your website. Knowing your audience will allow you to create content that will connect with them and drive them to take action with your company. Finding influencers that are in your industry and becoming aware of the type of content they create will help you create content that they would be willing to be involved with which would help you with brand awareness and getting your name out there. Researching your competitors will give you ideas for the different content that is being created in your industry and will also allow you to see what you are competing against. Researching is the best way to come up with content that will be effective in your industry.

Brainstorming Content Ideas

After you have researched your industry and know the type of content you need to create, you then need to come up with ideas for different content. The best way to do this is to have a brainstorming session. A part of this session is called a brain-dump. This is when you and your group write down and talk about anything that you can think of. It doesn’t matter how weird or out of the ordinary it may be. When brainstorming make sure you write everything that is said during the brainstorming down somewhere that you can refer back to. Once the “brain-dump” is over, you and your team can then start cutting out ideas that are unrealistic or do not work towards accomplishing the goals you have set. After this, you should have several great ideas that you could expound upon and create amazing content.

Organizing Your Ideas

After you have a bunch of different ideas for content, you need to organize it so that you can track its lifecycle. I would recommend using a continent organizer like Trello. With your content organizer, you can assign each person in your team a part of the contents life cycle. This will help keep everyone on task and will allow for the content to not get lost or forgotten about. Organizing your content will help your company keep consistency which will help in a variety of ways. There are lots of different ways to organize your content and it is up to you how you go about doing it.

Creating Your Content

Using different tools like canva, photoshop or video editors you and your team can create awesome content from the ideas that you have come up with in the earlier steps. Some content will take longer than others to create. Based on the idea that you are basing your content around will let you know what type of content it should be; a youtube video, instagram post, or even a blog. Every piece of content you make should have a goal of what you want that piece to accomplish. Some of these goals could be gaining more brand awareness, getting more followers, or driving people to take action. There are really two different types of content, the big content that you produce maybe once a month and the smaller type that you create daily. Some examples of larger pieces of content are youtube videos or blog posts while examples of smaller content are instagram posts or stories. When you produce a large piece of content you should make smaller pieces to go along with it. For example when you make a blog post, make an instagram post or facebook post that is highlighting a certain part of the blog post and leads the viewer back to the blog post. When you create your content. You will want to take all of this into account and it may change the final outcome.

Managing your Content

Different pieces of content will have to be taken care of differently. There are certain ways that you should go about taking care of them. When you create an instagram post, you need to respond to comments and be aware of what your followers think of the post. You can see how successful the post is based off of the likes and comments that it creates along with the number of followers that come along with it. Smaller content items usually are created and then are forgotten about. Bigger content is a different story. When you create a bigger piece of content managing it is a lot more work. Along with responding to the comments and checking how your followers are reacting to it, you also need to constantly be updating the piece of content. You need to update it in order to keep it relevant to your business. One thing that is very important to learn is your content, big or small, may die at some point. If the piece is completely irrelevant or the event that the content was created for is history then don’t put forth any more effort to edit the post, just let it die. Managing your content will help you see what content you should produce more of and what content was a dud. It is a very important process that will help your company be successful.

Conclusion

Content Marketing is a big part of the marketing process and may be the most important part. When done correctly it will help your business accomplish whatever you want. There are so many ways to do it but the best thing to keep in mind is to stay constant. Content marketing should not be overlooked and should be one of the main things you focus on.