By Codrin Arsene
Content marketing is a digital strategy that is finally being embraced by the majority of B2B and B2C businesses alike, across many different industries and expertise.
In 2019, most companies will know have some sort of content marketing strategy, but not everyone knows what they’re doing.
With technology available quite freely in the western world, putting your thoughts into a blog post and pressing publish is no longer going to work.
Instead, you need to understand the pillars of content marketing that are crucial if you want to make a successful strategy in the long term, which is where we come in.
The following 5 pillars are the only things you need to remember when creating your content marketing strategy.
1) Strategy
A lot of businesses seem to think the most important part of content marketing is posting regularly, but this isn’t necessarily the case.
In a world where we now create the same amount of information in two days as we did since records began up until 2003, competition has never been more intense.
Just to put this into perspective, 2 million blog posts are written and published every single day.
This means that you need to put the effort into creating and documenting a strategy before you get started so that you know what you’re doing from the get go.
Without it, you may find yourself reaching a standstill, with little idea about where you’re going or what the purpose of your content actually is.
You may also find yourself in a position where resources are going to waste and employees are losing steam, making it difficult for you to seek the same success others are receiving.
In fact, creating a documented strategy is so important that, in a research study reported by Digital Authority Partners, successful marketers are 60% more likely to use a documented content marketing strategy when compared to the 14% of their less successful peers.
2) Content
The next pillar of content marketing is, you might not be surprised to hear, the content itself.
When 84% of US companies with at least 100 employees will utilize digital content marketing by the end of this year, this is a pillar you need to think very carefully about.
By this point, your strategy should have outlined your target audience, which will allow you to brainstorm content ideas that resonate and are beneficial to them.
As well as being beneficial from an educational standpoint, you can also create content that is inline with your sales funnel and promotes people to buy your products and/or services.
In fact, a CMI report stated that 77% of B2B companies are crafting their content based on the specific stages of a buyer’s journey.
If you aren’t aware, these stages are broken down into three categories—awareness, evaluation, and purchase—and should all receive the same amount of attention in order to create a competent and successful content marketing strategy.
3) Optimization
Optimizing your content is incredibly important, and involves two different things: readability and SEO.
The readability side of things involves making sure that your content is accessible for everyone, regardless of their knowledge about the subject you’re talking about.
If it’s necessary for your content to include unfamiliar or complex language, using a plugin that provides definitions for these words may be beneficial to your audience.
Other ways you can optimize your content is by making sure that paragraphs aren’t too long, and that your website has lots of white space to avoid the content looking cluttered and unstructured.
When it comes to the SEO side of things, according to Website Magazine, you need to make sure that the content you’re providing actually benefits your target audience.
If it does, this will lead to an increase in your number of backlinks, and the more backlinks you have the more Google will trust you as an authority.
This is incredibly important as most people will not look past the front page of Google to find the information they’re looking for, with numbers being as high as 93% according to HealthcareWeekly.
4) Promotion
Statistics from March 2019 show that there are over 4 million internet users, so you need to think strategically about how you’re going to make your content stand out.
There are lots of different ways to go about promoting your content so that it’s seen by the right audience, and each method will work differently for different businesses and business models.
One of the popular ones is promoting your website on social media.
Things like Twitter and Facebook can work well if you’re in the entertainment industry or are specifically targeting B2B customers, but something like LinkedIn may be better if you’re a more B2C-focused company.
Other ways to promote your site include creating and building an email list, or partnering with online influencers that will bring fast leads and traffic to your website.
5) Analyze
After doing everything else, the last pillar involving analysing your content marketing.
Doing this using analytics like Google analytics will tell you lots of important information, like what is best resonating with your audience and what you could be doing to increase conversions from your content to your products and/or services.
Knowing this information means you can regularly improve your content marketing strategy and continue as a frontrunner within your industry.
Conclusion
We completely understand that content marketing can be confusing to get your head around, especially if you have no previous experience with this form of marketing and don’t really know where to start.
Having read the five pillars of the practice, however, we think it should be much easier for you to get started and really plan your strategy going forwards.
As you continue to follow the pillars we have set out, the process will only become easier and more streamlined, making you feel empowered by the results you have managed to create by making a few small, simple changes.
Author Bio: Codrin Arsene is the CEO of Digital Authority Partners
