Purposeful Content Marketing
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- Content Marketing Strategic Planning
- Understand Your Content Marketing Needs
- Build Trust and Credibility with Content
- Ensuring Your Content Is Sharable
- Using a Content Marketing Home Base
- Using Influencer Marketing to Distribute Content
- Measuring Content Return on Marketing Investment
- Proper Use of Social Platforms
What is Content Marketing
According to the Content Marketing Institute;
“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.”
Content Marketing – The Tip of the Spear
Content Marketing is the tip of the digital marketing spear for explosive growth opportunities for many businesses. Correctly executed and a company will grow. Incorrectly executed, and not much will happen.
It’s not about putting content out there and hoping for the best, which is what many companies do. Great Content Marketing ignites sharing and results in profitable actions for your company.
16-Steps to Best-In-Class Content Marketing
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- Develop a Clear Vision
- Develop a Business Case
- Create a Content Marketing Strategy
- Create an Extraordinary Mission Statement
- Target Audiences Based on Their Intent
- Involve Key Influencers
- Produce Help, Hub, and Hero Content on a Schedule
- Produce Content that is Engaging (This isn’t by chance)
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- Use Content Marketing Tactics
- Use Social Media Platforms that Matter
- Help Your Audience Find the Information
- Enlist Influencers to Help Customer on Their Journey
- Measure Using Useful KPIs
- Calculate Return on Marketing Investment
- Experiment and Test
- Build a Content Marketing Playbook
Creating Sticky Content
Sticky content has the following characteristics;
- S = Simple to Understand
- U = Unexpected
- C = Concrete
- C = Credible
- E = Emotional
- S = Superior Quality
- S = Story
Your content may not possess all the characteristics as it takes some imagination, but the more characteristics it does possess, the more likely your campaign will create impact. One of my favorite examples of great Content Marketing is Volvo’s Epic Split video campaign.
The 3 Types of Content
Content Marketing & SEO
In the past, SEO’s used specific on-page keyword and link-building strategies. Then Google launched the Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates. Now, it’s about natural language, natural link growth, and popularity. Link building is vital but limited.
That said, SEO today is about keyword themes and creating supporting content. As long as the content is high-quality and has influencer support, SEO will drive profitable business results.
In a nutshell, SEO strategies have changed. Content marketing is now necessary to achieve significant organic growth. The two are one. It will be challenging to grow organically without a solid content marketing plan.
That said, and due to the value of organic traffic, content marketing should have a seat at marketing’s main table.