How To Use Content Marketing

What is content marketing?

According to our friends at Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is - A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. This includes material like videos, blogs, and social media posts) which do not explicitly promote a brand but are intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

Take this example from Neil Patel -

Content marketing is all about storytelling, and humans have told stories for as long as they could speak. Our attention will always go to those who tell great stories.

Neil is right, good storytelling in any business will absolutely attract eyeballs. This applies to any company and brand...

B2B and B2C content marketing.

Whether you're in the B2B space of selling air conditioning compressors or in a B2C retail space selling clothing. Look at the table below comparing how marketing professions in B2B and B2C see content marketing. You'll notice they're rather equal:

There are some slight differences in what B2B and B2C marketers utilize content marketing for. In the B2B world, the number one goal of content marketing is lead generation. While in B2C, the main goal of content marketing is sales. However, both also focus their content marketing strategies heavily on brand awareness.

Content marketing is a precision marketing strategy.

Content is not about you or your brand – it’s about the audience. The best and most ideal content marketing strategy delivers value to that audience first and the brand second. In other words, provide value to an audience segment first... think of information that will help your audience do their jobs better or live their lives better.

When you provide high quality, relevant and valuable content, you inform and provide value. Content should inform your audience. It should express a perspective or opinion.

Quantifiably understanding the audience segment you want to inform is a critical first step in launching a content strategy. As an example, we've compiled some questions for you to think through when working to understand how to develop your content audience strategy:

• What are the psychographics and demographics of the group?
• What are their daily pressures?
• What keeps them awake at night?
• Why do they or why would they do business with us?
• What are the decision points? And why?

Example - Chief Marketing Officer (CMO):

Demographics:

• Age: 35-54 - (51%)
• Gender: Male - (64%)
• Member of the exec team
• Reports to CEO most often
• Short tenure (28 months on average)
• Wants to be seen as a driver of innovation and creativity
• Highly career-focused sees the success of the company as their own
• Leads by example, inspiring others with their passion

Pressures:

• Grow revenue
• Improve the experience of our customers
• Address rising customer expectations

Stressors:

• Return on marketing investment
• Integration, deployment, and execution of existing systems
• Integrating best practices

Complexity:
Responsibilities and requirements shaped by the complexity and diversity of today’s market landscape.

Customer engagement:
Utilizing data and technology to keep customers engaged and interested in an era of short attention spans.

Drive growth:
Delivering higher returns on lower budgets and continuing to achieve growth in a saturated market.

Strategy in tactical:
Short-term planning is taking over their time, but they need to be able to keep sight of the big picture.

The "what".

If you hear someone say you can just repurpose your sales materials as consumable content - that is typically not true. Remember, content marketing is a value first, sale second, or third or fourth strategy. Content helps you build a relationship and establish authority as a credible source.

So, what the hell do you write about? Even if your business isn't sexy, there still a plethora of content you can write about and sources to pull from. A few examples are:

• Customer successes
• Frequent questions your company receives
• Industry news - adding your company's perspective or SME's (Subject Matter Expert) perspective

How to measure content marketing ROI.

Content marketing has a ton of organic traffic and SEO value. Like all your marketing efforts, you should be asking "how is this strategy and the tactics working for me?". Here's a simple way to measure the ROI of your content marketing:

Step1: Go to Google Analytics (GA) and look at your organic traffic from content marketing. You do this by building all your links that point to your site, blog post etc. with UTM codes. Not sure what that is or how to do it? Check this free resource from Google out.

Here's how to locate it:

• Within GA, on the lefthand navigation, choose "Acquisition"
• Next, choose "Campaigns"
• Then choose "All Campaigns"

You should see a screen like the below example. Click on campaign as the primary dimension and you'll see your campaigns as to how you setup your UTM parameters.

Calculate how much it would cost to pay for that same amount of traffic. Using this method... we’ve seen clients recover the cost of their content marketing in less than a year and even double their organic traffic in just a few years.

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