Content Marketing is a digital marketing strategy that draws in customers based on their specific needs and challenges. It does this by answering their questions and concerns and speaking to their interests. Content marketing is often credited with helping customers succeed and avoid pitfalls and it has become widely integrated with several other marketing approaches because of its effectiveness. The reason content marketing works is because instead of being a pushy salesperson, potential customers are given helpful information, which makes them more trust more in what your business has to offer.
First, Determine The Final Goal of Your Content Marketing
What does your company hope to achieve through content marketing? Do you want to boost subscriptions to your software? Do you want to retain more customers? Do you want to increase sales for a particular product line of your tech? Do you want more website visits? Thinking about things like this in advance will help your team plan better and create create content that steers your audience towards this goal.
Remember, the key to developing a successful goal is to make sure that it is a SMART goal. Your goals should be specific in that it that there’s a clear who, what, when, where, and why. It should be measurable for the purpose of tracking progress and making comparisons. It should also be attainable within your company’s means of resources, including employees. Your goal needs to be relevant to your company’s best interest. Finally, it should also be timely with a deadline in mind to reach the goal.
Define Your Buyer Personas
Studying and interviewing your customers through such tools as buyer personas, will help your team learn about your customers’ level of technical knowledge, their motivations, and their challenges. It will also help you ask your customers the right questions to determine what content would simultaneously help your team accomplish the goals you defined for your content marketing and connect to your customers' best interest. When people have a problem or opportunity and are searching on the Internet for solutions, they are way more likely to click on something that will help them rather than an advertisement for a product. It is through informative or interesting content that people will become trust in the ability of your tech.
Focus on Sharing Useful Information
Sharing useful information will help position your company as a thought leader, meaning that all the knowledge and advice your company gives will make people come to think of your company as one that is very experienced and trustworthy, which will make people share your content with their friends, family, and coworkers, growing your audience. It is through this growing audience that your company will come to be seen as influential in your industry, and that in turn will make the average joe aware of you brand and bring the attention of more major media outlets consumed by your target customers.
Be Creative
Don’t focus on simply copying the content of your predecessors in the industry, but really listen to your customers. Create content that bridges their interests with your company atmosphere. For example, if you’re both more playful and enjoy some memes, incorporate that into your content to amuse your customers.
Your company should ultimately strive to create content that makes your customers’ lives easier through creative solutions. Even the smallest advances can cause big ripples in an industry and draw attention to your company. Content can also create a competitive edge for your company, making it stand out from the competition.
Run a Content Audit
Also, be sure to evaluate how your content is doing. This is called a content audit. It’s important to see what content is resonating with your audience and what is not, so that you can then retool your approach as necessary. Consider things like the subject of the content and the format it’s presented in when evaluating the success of your content. For example, maybe your customers gravitate more towards videos.
Create Diverse Content
Videos are particularly useful in tech. Visualizations make explaining tech concepts easier and people are drawn more and more to video content each year. Blog posts can be used to provide more detailed information about a particular concept. Infographics would work as great way to summarize reports or volumes of data, which would be particularly useful for those wrapped up in data analytics and reports.
Social media can also be used to share your content and content from other outlets (just make sure they’re not your competition). EBooks often combine several of these different types of content in a PowerPoint Presentation style format. Because eBooks can serve as a one-stop-shop for a variety of information, they are often used as an offer where you can encourage potential and current customers to give you their contact information in exchange for this eBook that would providing them valuable content.
Manage Your Content
There are a variety of tools available to help companies manage their content marketing. Hubspot offers a social media calendar, which allows companies to plan out their social media posts in advance and schedule them to post.
If there is content of yours that receives a great response from your audience or goes viral, don’t be afraid to repurpose it. Your team could either repost it or change it into another format. Maybe it was originally a blog and your team could decide to turn it into a video. This would be a great way to appeal to a Twitter audience if the blog was originally popular on LinkedIn. Also, don't be afraid to put yourself out there to create a wider network. Post your content on forums or other websites that fit with your customers’ interest and your industry.
Ultimately, staying true to your company’s values and genuinely wanting to helpful towards your customers will end up rewarding your company back.
