Content Marketing 101 | Your Guide To Creating Successful Campaigns
Whether you are a business owner, entrepreneur, or marketer, if your goal is to grow your business and get more attention, more attention, more clicks, and more customers, content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing available today.
More customers and more sales marketing are the answer, but the biggest problem with content marketing today is that you have to try all kinds of strategies and tactics, from blogging to social media to podcasting.
That's where you start, so in this episode, I'm going to help you cut through the noise and share some important content.
Marketing Strategies and Basic Marketing Principles The basic marketing principles you need to know if you want your content marketing to succeed today, so whether you're just starting out or you have content that isn't delivering results.
Whether you're looking for or you already have content marketing that you know works well, you want to focus here because content marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing.
How to create effective marketing campaigns
It can also be kind of confusing for you today, and it comes with its own unspoken or unwritten rules that most people aren't aware of. Ignored and unheard only get ignored, so let's fix that now by tackling the problem of not having enough quality content if you've been in business for a long time. All you need to be successful with content marketing is publishing high-quality content on a consistent basis, and in fact, this is practically the marketing gospel.
The quality part is correct, meaning that if your content marketing is going to be successful, it needs to be at least halfway decent, so we can check that box, but we'll do where most people fall short.
Uncheck the box that you see as the biggest problem with content marketing, it takes time and energy and effort, and a lot of people think these insanely high expectations and perfectionism should go into creating content.
The next great American novel or a Hollywood blockbuster is the fact that nothing could be further from the truth, and in fact often over-polished and over-advertised and over-hyped pieces can often perform poorly because the content is good, because they're polished and they look professional, so they're a bit more unreliable,
A little more fake, they look fake, I mean, it's hard for me to say, but when it comes down to it, you have to cut the bar to make content. You need a good YouTube video 1080 that looks good and any webcam can do it, and some of the best types of content that work right now are 15 seconds 30 seconds 60.
Seconds, like we see with Instagram and Facebook stories, mean you can grab your phone and chat with people if you want to do a kind of guerilla-style marketing run and talk gun.
There's no better and easier way to come across as a real and engaging and human kind of person than to share what's going on behind the scenes and in your world. It's not 2017 to post on Instagram every time, but I'm talking about creating relevant and relevant content specific to the target market you want to serve.
Or be a leader in your field, any way to connect this point would be valuable to them before we move on to the next level. More content and if that means you're currently creating one piece of content per month, try creating it once a week. If two to three times a week and had half decent success, now maybe up it to four or five or six or seven is obviously going to have limitations with this product, one YouTube video a day is going to be very difficult and tiring.
Whereas shooting two Instagram stories is about 30. A few seconds so there's no reason not to create more content like this on the topic of content creation and content creation for your audience.
I'd like to see a better one to take me to my next level. Created with the content creator in mind rather than the audience, market, customer and client driving measurable results home.
When you do this in your customer's shoes, you can be more understanding and more empathetic, and you can better understand where they are coming from, what their pain points are, their problems and frustrations.
Being able to create relevant and specific and valuable content that also helps them solve h content and that's the problem number one because nobody's really looking for it because it's not solving a problem that they have, so they're not likely to find it, and then problem number two, they're into it. Stumbling doesn't make it happen.
To be relevant to them, it might not be valuable so they won't consume it, and if they do consume it, they're unlikely to share it properly, so the next thing you need to understand when creating truly effective content marketing is your content.
Now I'm not talking about being specific, and I'm not talking about creating only long-tail keywords like sentences or statements or series of words in the content you create.
A pain or a problem or an objection or a concern or your intended audience is actually too broad and too specific for a dramatic example. Create content on how to grill the perfect steak, if your market is vegetarians, it doesn't make sense to do that I don't have other interests or things like playing guitar because that's not what I'm known for, that's not what I want to be known for, because even a small percentage of what you're interested in is a guitar-loving audience. Now when it comes to grabbing friends, creating content, and trying to go for mass appeal, it works when you look at massive corporations, billion dollar companies,
But the problem is that these strategies, these branding approaches, don't translate well when we start getting into small businesses that need to be a little more strategic and a little more specific.
So the next thing and let's talk about a big thing you want to avoid when it comes to content marketing is creating random content actions. Content is a trap I fell into early in my career, and it took me longer than I'd like to admit to climb out of that hole.
Or the motivation to strike, and then I'll make stuff now, and of course there are some good things like that, it kind of brings back the whole consistency of starting things like that, but there were also some negative parts, like I'd spend a lot of time and energy, and I thought it was a good piece of content.
You're creating content because someone told you to, it's not the best strategy to be strategic, you need to dial in who's creating the content for what your content goals are. Now I'm not talking about content strategy, what messages you're going to shoot in the content to achieve those goals, what media choices you're going to design around it, where you're going to promote it, how you're going to promote it, and make it all really effective.
You have to map it all out and design everything and make it perfect, but taking a few seconds to create the next piece of content and making sure it's the right content for the right people leads me right into my next step of making sure your content marketing is always aligned and you're putting it in the right place.
Now content alignment or alignment in general is really the talk of fancy marketers.
Your right people are the content and the topic and the content that covers the content message, the angles, the statements and the facts and basically you have a good understanding of the subject and these are the right things and then where you decide to distribute the promotion.
Whether you put this content on your blog on your website or share it on social media or upload it as a video or whatever, this is the media aspect of it, this is the right place. Making sure that all of these are aligned, and when you have the right market and message and media aligned, you're doing the right things to the right people in the right place,
That's when your marketing and your affiliate starts to click, so one of the biggest questions I get on a daily basis is, should I do Facebook marketing or Instagram marketing or YouTube marketing or what's the best platform to create content? Linkedin marketing or what marketing and the answer is my favorite answer of all time,
It depends but I won't hang you because it really only depends on two different things. The first and most important question to ask yourself in a second is which channels and which media outlets your ideal target market is present and active in. For example, if you do a bit of demographic research on your target market and find that.
Most of them are on Facebook or most of them are on Instagram, and then the easy answer is to go there and ignore everything and the reverse of that. If you do some demographic research and determine that none or at least a very large amount of your target market is on LinkedIn, it doesn't matter how great the latest marketing guru says your people are on LinkedIn. Don't go there, the next decision or criteria you need to figure out is what kind of content you want to create,
For example, you can build on a standard basis. And then obviously you want to avoid audio, if the thought of being on camera absolutely terrifies you, obviously we're going to stay away from a video-based strategy, yes I believe video is probably more powerful and one for you is audio followed by text followed by text but of course there are different ways around this.
Content marketing is one of the most powerful and effective ways to build your authority over a text-based marketing strategy such as email.
Build deep relationships and become a leader who actually goes into your space, so a text becomes a success, but that's why it's incredibly important to really dial things back and find out where your ideal target market is and is active. The content you want to create and then matching those two up is the next big thing you need to understand about content marketing, so focus here.
This content really forms the backbone of the entire customer journey and one piece of content isn't going to cut it, which is why you need to find a way to consistently create content so you don't hate it.
The ads you can write are the content email series you want to send as part of your marketing funnel, along with the video you want to create. Let me make it clear that my humble but honest opinion is just a secondary marketing to communicating value to your customer or client.
Marketing comes from putting yourself in their shoes to understand their pains and problems and frustrations and understand how your business is uniquely positioned, going where they take their hand and communicating that value.
Content is certainly one of the best ways to lead them through a process through a content-fueled journey that inevitably leads them to the logical and natural conclusion that your business is the best solution to their problems in my friend marketing. Putting all of this together and understanding things from a strategic kind of high-level perspective requires creating a modern marketing plan, so the next thing you'll want to do is watch the video I've attached.
Learn how to create a marketing plan right here, check it out now, and in the next chapter I'll look at the characteristics that make up those ideal customers.
