What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is a strategic process that consists of creating and distributing insights, valuable, relevant, and steady content to attract and increase engagement with the target audience or users. It aims to set up a strong and healthy relationship with the target customers, establish and maintain trust with the customer, and ultimately head toward profitable customer actions, such as by doing a purchase, taking or subscribing to any paid service, or some other profitable action. By offering valuable information and relevant content, businesses’ goal is to attract and retain the engagement and attention of target customers, who may become loyal brand advocates.
Steps of Content Marketing
To better understand the steps of content marketing, let’s take an example:
Suppose a company named ‘Healthcare’ has developed an app named ‘FitHealth’ for monitoring and suggesting health-related precautions. This app helps to monitor overall health and provides diet suggestions and precautions that need to be taken for a healthy and balanced life.
1. Planning of Content:
Planning content is the first step in the content marketing process. Content Planning involves in-detail steps that define various objectives, such as the purpose of marketing, the points that need to cover, the type of audience, the schedule for writing and publishing the content type of media that will be used for content marketing, parameters for measuring the success, etc. The first step defines the overall content in detail.
Example: In planning content initially, the Healthcare company states the aims and objectives of the app. They have also identified their target audience: between the age group of 16 to 40, and have decided the content regarding apps such as preventions, diet plan, and analysis that needs to be provided for their customers. Their performance will be evaluated based on the number of downloads of the app, social media account followers, etc.
2. Content Creation:
Content creation is the second step after planning. It involves creating informative content that would build interaction with the target audience. The main aim is to create relevant and reliable content. Content involves all the required information regarding the product or the parent topic. It is needed to be prepared in such a way that it is easily understood by the target audience.
Example: The team starts with creating content for engaging more audiences. They prepare content like healthy diet plans, weight loss strategies, amount of food to eat in a day, preventions for particular diseases, Do’s and Don’t for a healthy life, etc. With the help of this essential content, all the requirements of users are also achieved and the company attracts more customers.
3. Development of Asset:
Once the content is created, the next step is to develop the asset for marketing purposes. It involves making videos that include relevant information, techniques, usability, advantages, and experience of users. Graphics, infographics, and animations can also be used for asset development. Developing a proper asset helps customers to understand the content easily, improve SEO ranking of the company, and build a strong brand image.
Example: Along with written content, the team works for creating more effective assets such as videos, audio that has workout steps, reviews of customers, success stories, etc. They make use of graphics and animation for creating effective content. The development of such assets helps their target audience to gain more knowledge and trust regarding the app.
4. Shareability and Marketing:
Sharing of content is an important step for successful Content Marketing. Once the content and assets are ready the content prepared is shared among various social media platforms and websites for marketing. It helps in influencing more users and target audiences. It is necessary to make sure that all the content that is shared is relevant and authentic.
Example: Once all the content and assets are ready, the company shares them on social media and marketing platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Official Website, etc. It also shares the content or app on health-related websites to gain more traffic. Before doing this, the company makes sure that the shared content is correct, relevant, and informative.
5. Promotion of Content:
After sharing the content on various platforms the main step is the promotion of content. The content needs to reach the people who need it or those who are looking for it. Sharing the content with friends, bookmarking it, advertising, and personally advertising to the targeted audience can help the business promote the content.
Example: After sharing the content next step is to promote the content. The company encourages customers and users to share their videos and posts with their connections and bookmark posts. They also send emails to the targeted audience. Also, in order to improve communication with their users, the company also asks for feedback from them regarding any improvement they should do, or any suggestion the users have for them.
6. Repurposing:
Repurposing is the step where available content is used for promoting the content. The available content can be used for advertising, posting on social media, and email communications. Repurposing helps to save time and money. It helps to reach out to more users and customers. The content is already known therefore the person involved in advertising can perform well.
Example: The Healthcare company uses their already written and prepared content so that they can reach out to more users. The positive feedback received from users is posted so that new users and customers gain trust and show interest in their app. Due to repurposing, they have also saved their time and money.
7. Measuring the Ongoing Performance and Making Changes Accordingly:
Measuring performance is the last step of content marketing and involves analysing whether the targeted audience is satisfied with the product. It is to verify whether the defined progress is achieved or not. There are different ways that can be used to identify the overall performance, such as comments and reviews, number of social media followers, website visitors, email subscribers, traffic on the website, dwell time, bounce rate, etc. The performance is verified according to the plan. If not achieved, relevant changes are made in content and marketing strategies.
Example: Healthcare measures its performance through various parameters such as website traffic, number of downloads, follows, and email subscribers, and makes required changes to its marketing strategies and content based on the feedback received.