Content marketing is all about storytelling and let's face it, we’ve been doing this since we started to speak. Good storytelling holds attention, engages the audience and delivers something valuable and memorable.
The stories in today's business world get iterated via a variety of methods: blogs, tweets, videos, newsletters, emails, landing pages etc. Basically - anything an organisation produces that communicates a message. These are your stories. This is content marketing.
But in order to ensure your stories are heard and remembered there are some basic guiding principles for getting started.
Your content marketing strategy should be fully integrated with your marketing and overall business strategies. Taking a holistic view of marketing will help performance with marketing channels supporting each other.
Firstly you need to determine the 'why'. What are you aiming to achieve from embarking on a content marketing initiative.
Are you wanting to:
Once you have identified your goals it's important to keep them in mind when generating content.
And each piece of content produced needs to be aligned to these if it is to serve your business well.
Understand 'who' exactly you are talking to. If you try and hit the whole world your story will get lost. Trying to tailor it to suit everyone will only dilute your message.
To do this you’ll need to undertake research and include the following elements:
Realistically there will be more than one 'fits all' profile. Refer to your current customer base and break this down into several personas. But be careful not to create too many. You are, after all, going to have to consider each persona when generating content - will it be relevant to them, of value, will it make their jobs easier?
Too many personas will prevent your content from having 'focus' and so prohibit a clear message.
Importantly though, use insight gathered from your content analytics to ensure you update, refine, add, delete personas as necessary. Your business (you hope) will evolve over time and so should your personas and subsequently your content.
This is where content mapping comes in - match each step of your sales funnel to individual personas and content types to maximise engagement.
Now that you've determined 'why' and 'who' it's time to determine 'how' ..