According to the 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.”
Quality content is part of all forms of marketing: social media marketing, SEO, PR, PPC, inbound marketing, and more. Content marketing is the basis of all these forms of marketing so it is essential to have a strong content strategy.
If done successfully, content marketing can increase sales, save costs, and establish strong customer loyalty. There is a big difference between content marketing and other messages and posts: relevance and value. Without having some sort of relevance or value to your customers, content is merely spam. So how do you produce and share great content that is going to give you these benefits?
According to Textbroker, these are the essential steps to generating an effective content marketing strategy:
1.Content Audit Analysis. (what are you doing right and where do you need improvement?)
2. Goals Definition and Basic Structure Creation. (what are you looking to achieve?)
3. Content Development and Planning. (getting into the nitty gritty of your content outline)
4. Content Creation and Seeding. (actually creating your content and then evaluating it)
5. Content Monitoring and Controlling. (track your content and make sure it’s helping you achieve your previous goals)
Check out Textbroker’s infographic for more detailed bullets under each step:
Content Strategy Infographic by Textbroker
Firstsiteguide.com is also a great additional resource for web beginners to learn more about blogging and content marketing.
