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What you’ll learn here
Discover what it is all about all why it is more than ever important in today's world.
Explore my top 10 best case practices and tips to boost the success of your content strategy
Read more on the different types and formats of content you can use in your strategy.
How will it look like? Here's what I have to say.
The full process to create a proper content marketing strategy explained. Check it out.
What is content marketing?
And why is it important in today’s digital marketing world?
Content marketing defined
Content marketing is often described as the process of planning, creating and distributing different types of content to a brand’s target audience. It includes SEO, Social Media, Email, Blogging; among others. Content marketing helps organisations do three main things; create awareness, drive sales and ensure customers retention.
Why is content marketing important?
Content marketing has existed since the beginning of time. From prehistoric drawings on cave to share hunting memories to using VR to watch a movie, content marketing has evolved and with it, the channels. So, why is it important?
3 Reasons why content marketing is important
Content in all of its ways
Should you use an image or a video? Is it okay to re-share content?
The types and formats of content
Content may vary in types and formats. With constant changes to how content is consumed and the attention span of customers, it is crucial to find a content type which captivates. While there are several declinations, content can be regrouped in broad types and specific formats.
Content types
Content can be categorised in 3 main broad types. These are owned, paid, and earned media. Let’s find what these are. While all these three content types are important, having them work together is beneficial for your overall brand presence, helps in your SEO strategy, and adds another layer to your credibility online.
Owned Media
These are content and channels that you control and on which you decide which content to appear. Owned media can include your website, your social media page, or a blog that you host. The more owned media, the better it is for your SEO strategy and online brand presence.
Paid Media
These are content and channels you are sponsoring or advertising using third party tools. These may include PPC or Facebook Ads. Paid media allows much better targeting with profiling and segmentation strategies.
Earned Media
These are when you get coverage from externals such as your influencers sharing your content (for free) or media relaying your content on their own channels. Tracking your earned media is important to maintain your brand presence.
Content marketing formats
Audio
This type of content is promising with the surge in voice search. Among the audio content, podcasts are the most used globally. Podcasts are mostly available on streaming platforms such as iTunes and Soundclouds. Even if in Mauritius it is still to peak up, here’s an example on Building trust with your clients.
Other audio formats: audio-books, recordings, and translations.
Written
Written content is the most used one. It goes from blog posts, e-books, press-releases and digital ads. Digital content with proper Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has a higher chance to rank on the first page of search engines and hence drive more clicks. Getting your written content right requires copywriting and content architecture skills. To read more, head to my library or download 30 copywriting tips two-pager.
Other written formats: emails, presentations, case studies, product descriptions, Ad copy, and How-to guides.
Visual
From infography to posters, visuals are a great way to share information in a condensed format. For instance, infographies are an efficient way for marketers to convey important information in a one-pager. Other formats such as social media posts and illustrations are also used as a way to generate traffic to websites and create engagement.
Other visual formats: infographies, banners, and charts.
Videos
Videos are undoubtedly among the top most used content types by marketers. In fact, according to the State of Digital Marketing Report 2020, Video Production & Editing is in the Top 3 skills for marketers in 2020. Channels such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and recently TikTok continues to see an increase in video content from Mauritius.
Other video formats: Explainers, Corporate Videos, Social Ads, and demos.
Create your own content strategy
8 clear steps to create your content strategy.
1. Know your customers
No content marketing strategy can be fully successful if you are creating it without knowing your customers. That’s why this is the most important step in creating content.
There are many ways to get to know your customers and this is a continuous process. I would recommend these top ways to begin:
- Persona: This little document that helps you outline the motivation, interest, and other demographic information about your target audience. I like this example.
- Get feedback: Get and read the feedback received from interaction from every touchpoint whether it is online or offline.
- Read the comments: Use your social media to read the comments and measure the sentiment of your fan base.
- Analyse your data: Go through the analytics of your website, social media and other channels.
- Use your competitors channels: Do a competitive analysis and analyse their fan base interactions. One step further: Check how I scrap public data from known influencers.
2. Define your customer journey
Mapping your customer journey can help you see the bottlenecks and high converting factors. While creating your content strategy, defining this journey will also help you understand where to share content of different types.
I believe there are two things that you need to look out in your customer journey:
- The actual channels which includes social media, website, emails, and more;
- The psychographic data which describe the intent and behaviour of your leads at every step of your customer journey.
Oh, btw what is psychographic data?
Psychographic data is similar to demographic data. However, these data goes a step further and tries to define the reason why people would buy your product. It takes into consideration interests, motivations, likes and dislikes, among others.
Psychographic data helps you create hyper-targeted content that speaks to your audience 5 senses.
If you want a concrete example, I urge you to watch The Great Hack on Netflix which depicts how Cambridge Analytica used psychographic data to influence voters.
3. Define your overall budget
Money, money, money! While organic could work out well and you now have a pleiade of tools to create content, having a budget can definitely help you to increase your distribution.
In my recent blog post, Marketing Budget – Getting it right in 2020, I shared 3 main tips on how to proceed to budget your marketing activities + I also shared a free template to help freelancers and startups manage their finance.
Briefly, here’s what you are going to learn when reading the blog post:
- How did you perform previously?
- Know where to invest in 2020
- Aligning your channels to your customer journey
4. Set your goals and KPIs
Goals and KPIs will help you keep track of your strategy performance. Without them, you’ll only assume that you are doing good when you might not be even on the average.
These are often closely linked to the company’s overall objectives as well as the marketing ones. Generally speaking you’d want your content to do one of the following:
- Brand Awareness
- Acquisition
- Retention
While these are high level goals, let me break it down to some measurable figures that you’ll find on tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Ads Manager.
- Brand awareness: engagement (likes, comments, shares), reach, website visits, etc.
- Acquisition: sign-up count, purchase, leads count and quality, conversion rate, sales count, etc.
- Retention: returning visitor, conversion rate, repeat purchase, account upgrade, etc.
5. Decides which channels to use
This is closely linked to defining your customer journey. There are several frameworks that you can use to align your channels to your customer journey such as:
- Awareness - Interest - Desire - Action
- Attract - Convert - Delight - Advocate
- Awareness - Engagement - Discovery - Purchase - Retention
These frameworks are mostly used to identify which channels to use and what type of content to include to push people towards the end goal, which is to make a purchase.
The channel choice depends majorly on where your customers are at and can include numerous ones based on where you are interacting in the customer journey. For example, social media is mostly used in the Awareness and Retention phases, respectively.
6. Decides which content to create
I’ve covered the type of content in the previous sections, but here where it gets strategic. Choosing which content to create is also linked to your customer funnel AND the psychographic data you gathered earlier.
The model is a simple content marketing funnel which is mostly used to attract people in the business i.e. new customers purchasing your products and services.
- The Top of the Funnel (TOFU) is where people get to know you and often require content that pushes for more Brand Awareness. Here you need to be able to provide a valuable solution to your customers’ problems or be able to activate the need or awareness of the problem.
- Middle of the Funnel (MOFU) content helps customers to find more about the solution you are proposing. You want to be listed among the potential solutions to your customers’ problems.
- Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) is where you’ve been able to be on the top potential solution providers. You’ve gained the interest of your customer and now you need to push for acquisition by giving an upgraded value proposition compared to your competitors.
7. Promote
Now that you have your content ready and know where to share it’s time to promote it. Promotion can be organic or paid. There are few things that needs to be taken into consideration while promoting your content:
- Have different format of the same content for different channels
- Think mobile first as most of your traffic might be coming from mobile devices
- Use tracking links as a way to measure the reach and performance of your content
- Know when to share to have maximum engagement and reach
- Determine whether the content you created is a free or premium content requiring a sign-up or payment
- Have a budget ready for social media marketing. Facebook is cheaper compared to LinkedIn paid advertising
Facebook Ads Secrets uncovered
8. Analyse and Optimise
I really like this part of the content marketing strategy because that’s where you get to know whether your content is really king; the secret being in the data. The end goal is to assess whether the investment put in creating content is effectively bringing Return on Investment (ROI).
Optimisation of your content marketing strategy is broadly categorised under these four areas:
- Optimising for search engines where you’ll look at your search rankings, traffic and content architecture bearing in mind SEO guidelines. I really like this one-pager from Rand Fishkin, which gives you the elements you should consider while optimising for search.
- Optimising for Social Media where you’ll look at your engagement rate, reach and clicks to websites from the channels you’ve used. This type of optimisation is crucial since it is mostly used at the top of your customer funnel.
- Optimising for customers where you’ll perform a gap analysis to see if what you created is matching what your customers really want and need. Sometimes, reviewing your copywriting and content architecture can really help. Check out 30 tips I share in an e-book.
- Optimising for your teams where you’ll see the preparedness of leads generated and optimise your content for higher conversion rates.
Concretely, what are the figures you have to look out for:
- Search engines: Clicks, Conversion rates, Dwell Time, Bounce Rates, Ranking, and more. Check these top KPIs
- Social Media: Overall engagement rates, Reach, Leads generated, and more. Check the rest of it.
- Customers: Conversion rates, % of page scrolled, Clicks, Downloads, leads generated and more. Check the top KPIs.
My Top 10 Best Case Practices
Ingredients for your content marketing success.
While writing this piece of content, I wanted to have one section to up the value of it. Here are my 10 best case practices which are applicable to any industry or channel. These cover different aspects of content marketing.
Copywriting
Break your full paragraphs into smaller sentences because it increases the readability and is not a hassle for your readers to consume and assimilate your text.
Social Media
It’s not necessary to be present on all of them. Be where your audience is. Understand the algorithm of the channels, it’s key for your content distribution.
Customer journey
Create aha moments for your customer at specific phases in the journey. It could be a personalised message or a token of appreciation that plays on the psychographic data of your leads or customers.
Automate
but not too much. You still have to provide a human experience to your audience.
Information architecture
is often forgotten. But, it is an important way to bring your customers to YOUR end goal. A bad content architecture is like going for a walk in a crowded area; you get lost or distracted very easily. Check out this cool article about it.
SEO
While I could give you hundreds of best practices, write as if you are talking and do proper keyword research. Focus on the user experience as well. Optimise for featured snippets and voice. (okay I gave 4)
Email marketing
It’s still among the highest converting channels. Pay attention to segmentation and personalisation in your content. And, hey GDPR and DPA as well. Read how to improve your conversion rate.
Senses
Explore different ways to communicate through the 5 senses of your audience. It could be via a video, a podcast or written content. Try immersive experience.
Map
your customer journey to channels and add one layer for the emotions you expect the leads to have at each phase. This will allow you to create more relevant content.
New technologies
such as chatbots, VR, AR and Voice are the future. Start adapting your content to them. Adaptive content marketing is the future.
The future is bright
My take on the future of Content Marketing in Mauritius.
The future of content marketing
This is where I share my personal thoughts on the future of content. Well, it’s still going to be here, there’s no doubt about it. But, the way we know it today won’t exist in a few years. Not that we will stop reading or listening to it, but the channels will change. We are starting to see VR, AR and other new technologies creating immersive experiences for customers. This is the future!
I also urge content creators to go beyond sitting at the desk and do copywriting. They absolutely need to understand their customers. They need to dig deep in the data and become psychologists. That’s how you will start creating content that converts.
The future of content is bright. You need to get accustomed to terms like personalisation, omni-channel, user experience and more, as content marketers will be expected to fully make use of these terms in the near future.
So go ahead. Start creating!