4 Steps To Content Marketing Success In 2021.

If the pandemic has made one thing clear for all types of businesses; it’s that people are online now more than ever, consuming content every minute. In the past year alone, the marketing landscape all over the world has undergone a massive shift fuelled by the impact of COVID-19 and worldwide lockdowns.

No matter what industry you’re in, If you’re a marketer in today’s online-first world, chances are you’re constantly trying to come up with ways to tell your brand’s story in an engaging and compelling manner.

With more businesses investing more in online marketing, creating relevant and valuable content that resonates with your target audience is critical to ensuring any marketing strategy’s success.

Our unique four-step approach to effective content marketing can help you generate awareness, build trust and drive quality traffic and conversions. All while allowing your company to become an insightful thought-leader in your field.

1) Analyse and Develop a Strategy

Before you develop any type of content marketing, it is important that you conduct sufficient research and develop a clear content strategy plan. This will be the blueprint to your marketing and each piece of content should be underpinned with a clear goal and objective. When developing your content strategy, be sure it answers the following questions:

  • Who is your target audience(s)?
  • What type of content does your audience(s) respond well to? Would it be blogs, case studies or video content?
  • What are the terms or topics that will allow you to produce an authoritative piece of content?
  • How can you have a unique competitive edge over content that has already been produced similar to this?
  • Where will you be publishing the content? Is it something suitable for LinkedIn, and therefore needs to be quite visual, or is it a whitepaper that prospects can download and will expect long-form text with less focus on imagery.

2) Content Creation

Now that you have your strategy in place, the next step is to start creating content. Bear in mind, you don’t need specific knowledge or expertise to write good content. You don’t need to be a MedTech specialist to write an article on cardiovascular devices – you just need to be able to interview those that are, and turn it around into enticing content.

Whether you’re selling high-end medical devices or stainless steel parts and components, it’s important to recognise that every customer has needs and problems that are unique and different. As a marketer, your goal is to develop quality content that addresses their needs and provides answers to their problems in a most engaging format.

Here are some common forms & types of content you can create:

  • Blogs
  • Case-studies
  • E-books & Whitepapers
  • Videos
  • Podcasts
  • Infographics
  • Webinars

3) Content Distribution

Okay, so now that you’ve got all this great content in the pipeline, it’s time to market it to make sure people see your content.

There are three types of content distribution: Owned, Earned and Paid.

Owned: You can publish and promote your content through your brand website, blog, social media channels or mobile apps

Earned: This is anyone who shares your content e.g. customers, journalists, other resources. This is free marketing as a result of good quality content, hence the name earned.

Paid: This includes PPC, social media advertising, influencer marketing or any other channels that involve monetary exchange.

Where you will populate your content depends on who your intended audience is. It’s always recommended to promote your content across multiple channels to stand out.

If you’re following the strategy correctly, you will have identified the platforms you are publishing on in stage two of the process.

4) Measure & Analyse

Remember the goals that you set in step one? Analysing your content now, how is your content performing against these goals? Are you achieving valuable leads? Have you seen an increase in traffic and engagement since publishing? In which channels are you seeing the most engagement?

Depending on where you distributed the content, measure your success accordingly through Google Analytics, social media analytics dashboards, and other necessary and relevant platforms. 

Conclusion

Creating a long-term, rewarding and engaging content marketing plan can seem overwhelming and daunting at the start. But by staying determined, following the above steps and staying true to your brand’s message, you can create a winning content marketing strategy in no time. At IMS, we build highly effective content strategies that are based on informed thinking, customer profiling and extensive search term research. Talk to us today about how we can help you create content that converts.

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