How To Craft Great Content Marketing in 11 Steps

Content marketing is more important than ever, according to a recent study, 56% of B2B find it an effective way to deliver return on investment (ROI).

So the common question is :

How do you create personalised and engaging content marketing?

Why do you think big brands call on advertising agencies to help build their content marketing? The answer’s simple, because these people are specialists, who spend weeks manipulating tonnes of data and surveys (on behalf of the brand) in order to have insight into what the customer wants and needs when launching a new product.

The other obvious reason is that they can afford to pay someone else to do the research for them, thus saving them time, and time is money.

What can we learn from their content marketing?

Think for a minute and allocate an hour of your time. The aim here is to analyse and understand their way of communicating with their customers. So here’s the challenge.

Pick up one of your preferred brands and ask yourself these questions:

• How they built and maintained their brand reputation?

• Which channels are they using to share their content and get the consumer’s attention?

• Why and when are their customers coming back for more?

• What titles and catchy phrases are they using to attract their audience?

So, have you got the idea. Not yet? You’re probably thinking – they have got a much bigger budget than we do, making it easier to hire people to create their content marketing. Well that’s true, but let me ask you this question.

Would you be interested to learn how to craft content marketing yourself ?

If the answer is yes, start by collecting your thoughts, gather some material and we’ll provide the framework for how to create your own content marketing.

Here is the 11 steps to follow:

1. Do market research – collect, analyse customer information, identify which digital channels they are using and build specific keyword groups.

2. Know your audience – based on your customer analysis identify your ideal customer’s world, for each persona groups. Remember always address a pre-identified segment of your audience with positive trigger words that push people to have a reaction whether that’s physical or emotional. We suggest to create and populate a buyer persona spreadsheet with details. This the most important part in your journey. We call it the audience and/or buyer’s journey.

3. Talk expertise – A decent copywriter looks to apply a concentrated number of high-power words and phrases that will deliver results starting with engaging business themes that will resonate with different types of reader. If you’re just starting emphasise your belief and go for an authority blog. The main aim here is to nurture your prospect’s soul with your expertise – that is your very own content.

4. Create killer headlines – Turn your headline into a magnetic title – make sure your main keyword is near the beginning of the title. Create attractive, controversial, informative headers. The idea is to capture attention and invite content focusing on reader’s needs, problems or opportunities.

Above all, ask yourself what added value can your business offer ?

5. Create great content marketing – Not only helps readers benefit from your knowledge and experience, but also makes them more likely to want to share it. So, remember this, any content you produce needs to be highly relevant and delivered with the right tone, otherwise they will ignore it – or fall asleep!

6. Keep body text simple and direct – Re-formulate your headline and clearly develop what the benefits are – make use of bullets points to show it. Also do not promote your brand name throughout the whole page.  If you want online readers to love your products and engage you’ll have to change your pitch and make it something engaging, subtile style which grab people’s interest – What’s in it for them“.

7. Include an image or two – Visual content empowers and grab readers’ attention. When possible, use images that include human expressions to maximize the impact. Consider mini-infographics, they work well in all aspects.

8. Use case studies – You could sit there and write brilliant marketing copy stating how great your product or service is, but unless your audience can see how it has benefited someone like them, they’ll probably think it’s just PR. So where possible use “real case studies” to enhance your content selling power.

9. Link content pages – To further support your SEO goals, include links to other relevant content you’ve created, both on and off of your site. Also link product features / benefits on third-party sites with specific keywords within your content. When writing your articles, do it with content marketing optimisation in mind, look for one main keyword only, but you also can and should use multiple synonyms within your phrases.

10. Write content strategy with style – One of the major challenges digital copywriters must understand is that copy or content must be intriguing, strategically developed and if you want to really engage your target audience you must tell the story about your brand, and not a load of blurb about your strategy, or product features they’re not interested. See example below.

Remember, your audience want to know and will ask: “What’s in it for me?“.

Image source: Moz – From Whiteboard Friday by Rand Fish

You also must include a call-to-action on your landing pages and blog articles.

Here’s how:

First and foremost before sticking to a single Call To Action (CTA) you must test it two to three times and see which works better.

Example: create a CTA in the middle and the bottom of the page, then another one with single CTA on the top hand-right corner. For B2C sites you can go for a sale directly as the person may not return to your site. For B2B, the sales funnel will be divided into phases. You need to start by offering something free behind your e-newsletters so you can collect email addresses in return.

Secondly, after a month or so you should take a look at how many conversions you’ve made. If you’ve only converted a few, look at your sign-up form and landing page – and ask yourself this?

Do I offer any added value or benefits? Have I promised to respect their privacy?

Thirdly, think how and when you need to keep nurturing the conversions you made.  So, you should follow up with one or two emails that offer added value or an unexpected report or case-study with a call to action. Personalise the email including short content with link for conversion . Some businesses follow up with some courtesy calls, great opportunity to get to know your subscriber, don’t you think?.

If you write a company newsletter you need to think about your long-term commitment otherwise your content will have no genuine impact.

11. Control and listen the crowd– Set measurable objectives from the start. Example: Site or blog pages unique views with newsletter subscriptions – you must target these with simple processes allowing you to track things like: click-through rate (CTR), time spent on page, bounce rate, unique visitors, city or country, keywords etc. Without these in place, it will be like navigating in the dark, becoming harder to measure and unable to tell how effective your content marketing is.

For total beginners, we suggest reading two essential elements from CMI marketing experts. I’ve followed Content Marketing Institute for over five years and I will recommend you to do the same. Joe Pulizzi and his team have helped marketers how to become real publishers – created hundreds of concise material, guides that you can read, use and download. They explain you how to quickly learn, lay out the steps to start your own blog. After all, you always go quicker with a step-by-step guide.

Conclusion:

All the steps above will deliver great results if blended with the right attitude. It will motivate you even further, when seeing comments or likes, inspiring you to write and continue this journey until you become a serious and respected copywriter. Hard to believe? Maybe, you’ll never know if you don’t give a try.

Remember that any content marketing starts with a clear strategic mapping plan that should include everything from listening, keywords, search volume and customer relevancy to blog posting, linking (internally and externally) and of course integration of social networks. All the above need to be planned from scratch in order to know what areas or content marketing topics you should be creating or improving. But first, analyse and measure your actions in order to see how effective your content marketing is.

Does your business need some extra help? Contact us today – 01252 679885 for an informal chat.

Post updated:16.11.16