According to a recent McKinsey survey of more than 400 companies worldwide, 71 percent plan to increase their investment in content marketing over the next three years.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a form of marketing where the creator of a product uses content to educate and inform an audience, typically using popular digital platforms like blogs, social media, video, etc.
To create effective content, it must be relevant, interesting, and engaging.
Content marketing aims to promote brand awareness and loyalty through consistent exposure to the company’s message through various content channels (e.g., blogs, videos, etc.).
A successful content marketing strategy will help you promote your products and services and improve your website’s visibility in search engines.
Great content doesn’t just happen – planning is key! To create content that will bring in new customers or keep your existing customers engaged, you need to have a strategy in place.
Building content strategy
To create the best possible content for your audience, follow these steps when planning and creating your content marketing strategy.
Step 1: Know your audience.
Before you can create content that will appeal to your audience, you need to know what they want to read about and who they are.
The first step to creating great content for your audience is to create buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers and are a key component in creating content that resonates with them.
Before you can create buyer personas, you need to understand your market, so start by researching what’s out there already—network with other marketers in your industry.
Other possible ways to understand your audience are:
- Attend industry events and speak with people in your industry on LinkedIn.
- Search for groups on Facebook, subreddit, forums related to your industry and read their discussions.
- Use audience research tools like SparkToro to give you insights into what your audience listens to, reads, and watches.
- Run surveys targeting your existing customers. Sometimes your existing customers will tell you what problems or challenges they face; These are the topics you can target in your content strategy.
Step 2: Create a content mission statement
A content mission statement is a way of documenting your content marketing strategy.
Why is documenting important for marketers?
The research of CMI shows that marketers who document their content strategy are more likely to get better results and ROI. Mainly, it helps align every piece of content with the business goals and the audience’s pain points.
Here’s what you need to do instead?
Start with a simple content mission statement that has three core elements
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- Who is it for? It would be best if you had an understanding of your target audience.
- How will you help? Identify what content (format, type) you’ll produce to solve the pain points.
- What benefits will it provide to the audience?
Here’s an example of a content mission statement of content marketing VIP.
Types of content marketing to consider
If you want to get started with content marketing, here are a few examples of different types of content marketing you can do for your startup:
- Blogging –
You can write blog posts on your company’s website and blog about relevant topics to your audience. You can include calls to action in the post and make it easy for people to subscribe to your email list and contact you.
- Social media –
You can share interesting articles and updates on your social media accounts. This is also a good time to share videos and photos that your target audience will like and help you gain more followers.
- Podcasts – You can talk about topics related to your startup in this format that allows people to consume content while they’re on the go.
- E-books –
You can share information on how people can use your product or service by creating an e-book formatted for easy reading.
- Video –
The video format of the content is booming right now. Almost every startup is doubling down on its video content format, whether it is in the form of webinars or educational content.
Mobile content marketing
Content marketing is not a new marketing strategy. It is just a new name for an old marketing strategy. According to Crisp Video Productions, content marketing is simply a creative and focused approach to providing information to the audience you want to reach” Crisp Video Productions.
A successful mobile content marketing strategy should provide relevant, valuable, and beneficial content to the audience.
You may have noticed that mobile users are a different group of consumers than desktop users. This is because mobile users have different expectations and needs, and they prefer to control their experience.
This article will look at how content marketers can consider when developing a content strategy for mobile devices.
How to get started with mobile content marketing
- Optimize for mobile SEO
The growth of mobile users in Google organic search is increasing year after year. Therefore, marketers cannot afford to avoid mobile SEO.
Here are a few things that can be considered in terms of mobile SEO.
Page speed:
Page speed is a significant factor in search engine rankings and a user-focused feature in content’s user experience. Simply put, users perceive pages that load faster as being of higher quality and experience fewer bounce rates. Conversely, when things take longer, we tend to feel frustrated and look for other places to spend our time.
Mobile responsive website:
Mobile responsive websites have become ubiquitous, often being the only relevant option for startups and small businesses. Unfortunately, this is due to the high cost of developing a native mobile app, not to mention the significant time and money required to maintain it.
Other important factors are:
- Content readability of mobile devices
- User-experience
- Optimizing title and meta description for mobile SEO
- Email content strategy for mobile devices
Email responsiveness for screen sizes
First, start with optimizing your email for better open rates.
Full-size images in emails are problematic in terms of size and readability, making sure the images are optimized – use images under 100 kb.
It’s always better to test the email content on mobile devices before sending it to your subscribers.
Place your Call-To-Actions for higher CTR.
Create CTAs, buttons, boxes, or other attention-grabbing elements that mobile users can easily scan and drive them to take action (for example: click on a button, subscribe to a newsletter, share a page, etc.).
Future of content marketing
The content marketing landscape had drastically changed from its inception when marketing departments sent sales collateral via mail to prospects and customers. Today, the landscape is much more competitive and noisy. With so many brands producing content, marketers and their strategies must adapt or die.
Author name: Sk Rafiqul Islam
Author bio: Sk Rafiqul Islam is a content marketer who helps small to medium-sized businesses grow traffic and generate more leads. He is the founder of content marketing VIP, a content marketing newsletter that delivers actionable insights.
