Steps in the Process of Content Marketing – Everything You Need to Know
At its core, the process of content marketing is about telling a story. For an author, the act of coming up with a story, its plot, its characters, and its setting is all rooted in the abstract. However, a content marketer must go about the process of storytelling in a different manner. Content marketers must consider the nature of their business or organisation, the category of their products and services, the reality of the market conditions, and the preferences of their intended customer base before they begin to tell a story. By that logic, a skilful content marketing agency must be able to help multiple businesses and organisations tell the story of their services and their journey. But remember, it’s all business, after all. So, here’s how it’s done.
Setting goals and KPIs
Content marketing is hardly a random activity. I’m sure you have a goal or a target in mind before you begin the process. You need to be certain about this goal as it helps you better direct your marketing efforts. Common content marketer goals include increased traffic to the website and its landing pages, gaining better leads, and the eventual conversion of a lead to a sale. While at it, determine the KPIs that will help you measure the progress and success of each goal. These performance metrics should be quantitative measures that can be tracked and analysed.
Conducting competitor analysis
The next step in this process is to keep your friends close and your competitors closer! In the marketing plateau, businesses should know what their competitors are doing and how they are keeping the audience engaged by doing competitors analysis. But if you are determining your audience, you target not only the obvious ones but also the news, entertainment sites, references and more that are keeping your audience’s interest. Inspect the content pieces that worked best while also analysing the keywords used in them.
Auditing current content and performance metrics
It is also important to assess where you and your content stand. There is a high possibility of gaining crucial insights from the existing content you have published, whether it is blogs, social media content, infographics and more. Analyse the content piece that generated the most interest and received the most traffic and create a content audit report for your reference. Researching keywords is also important as it will give you insights into the words people have used to look for your site. Make sure to run performance metrics rounds to create an overview of the type of content that your target audience is interested in.
Deciding the content type
After setting the stage for the content comes deciding the type of content you want to publish. Your brand can have a variety of content pieces spanning across blogs, podcasts, webpages, infographics and more. Don’t forget social media; it’s where most of your audience might be lurking!
Finalising your resources
While you might have many ideas sprouting in your creative meetings, it is essential to have realistic goals to meet. This is where you determine your resources. Whether you plan on having an in-house content team or outsource your content marketing to a content marketing company, make sure to have allocated resources so that it doesn’t get time-consuming or take your attention from the business you are running.
As a parting thought, we’d like to add that immersive content is the bedrock of content marketing. If your content isn’t engaging enough for the target audience, there’s a high likelihood that your website will be dismissed anyway. So, here’s a golden rule – never undermine the value of quality writing. After all, quality writing is the foundation of quality content. You can always trust a quality content writing agency to deliver quality writing.