Content Marketing
It is as easy as ABC – Always Be Creating. Learn why ‘Content Is King’ has become a digital marketing cliche.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is basically using content to expand your visibility and grow your audience through information. Most content can be boiled down into being either expert knowledge or informative or entertaining. Usually, content is one of those two categories for small businesses that amounts to using content to help your clients understand what it is you do or provide.
In some cases, that’s giving out free advice. Let’s imagine you are an electrician and are trying to grow your business. People who need an electrician may be searching for D-I-Y stuff like “how do I fix my kitchen lights?” This is an opportunity to give them quick tips that would help them fix their kitchen lights on their own. That’s a really easy way of finding people that are looking for things you can provide, simply by having that information online.
Now, you may not get clients that way, but you’re building your assets and growing your online content out.
Steps of Personalization
Defining Audiences
A good content marketing strategy is going to start with market segmentation. This means breaking down your audience into various categories based on your experience and just who needs your services.
So, if you’re an electrician, your potential audience may be homeowners with an income of over $75,000 a year. Or, it may be businesses or small business owners. It may even be public buildings that need an electrician frequently.
Understanding Their Problems
You can then begin to do research for that content. All of those different groups are gonna have various problems that you can either provide a solution for or information about.
This research can then be broken down into keywords, terms, or phrases that people commonly search for. These phrases can be things YOU can provide that they may not even know they need. This can be done via paid social or organically, creating brand awareness and what it is that you do.
Once you have this content, you can then recontextualize that into all of the different channels you’ll use to create your sophisticated digital marketing department. What are those?
Providing Content
Your keywords are basically the building blocks for your content. If you are looking to have an article written by a content writer, your keywords can then be used to create a content brief (an order form for a writer that gives them strict instructions on what they need to write).
Writers may be talented, but if they’re not an expert in your particular field, you may need to spoon-feed them to help them do the research. Your insight will help them put words together in an engaging way and also hit those keywords and topics you are targeting.
Channels
If you’re doing search engine marketing, like pay-per-click, you then need to use those keywords to build your ad campaign. Ad campaigns are built on keywords. If you are doing an email marketing campaign, you’ll need content for that email, which will require a writer to put together.
Each one of your channels will be dependent on content. And that, in a nutshell, is how a content marketing strategy works. From audience and market segmentation research to keyword and search intent research. This trickles down to what needs to be put together for your content through these various channels.
