Content marketing is a powerful tool to help small businesses reach their target audience and achieve their marketing objectives. As with any marketing strategy, there are frequently asked questions that marketers and businesses have when it comes to creating and implementing a content marketing plan.

We will address some of these questions by providing informative answers so that you can better understand content marketing and how it can be used to drive engagement, build brand awareness, and, ultimately, increase revenue.

What are the essential components of good content?

In the sense of essential components, it means what our content should be made of.

It has to be Useful

Write content that answers the reader’s question or gives the reader all necessary information concerning the topic. Nobody will continue reading your content if it’s not useful for them. Usefulness affects reader engagement. It cannot be interesting if it’s not useful, and your target audience will not read it.

It has to be engaging

Even when it is relevant to a user, you still have to write the content to be engaging. You have to add elements like images and videos. You can even turn your content into an infographic. You have to do something that will be engaging for the user. They will read it and resonate with the content if it’s engaging.

Should have a clear call to action

You must write the content in such a way that it can arouse a call to action. If you are writing a blog post with good content, it should leave a user with where to go. Therefore, ensure you have a call to action. Put some internal links in your content that would give the reader a place to go for more information after they engage with the good content you wrote.

It has to be Credible

Anybody can write, but are you writing about something you know about? Are you a good talking point, an expert, or experienced on the topic? You also have to use information from a legitimate source.

It has to be Original

Write something that nobody else has written. Even if it’s a topic someone has written on, you don’t have to plagiarize because if you plagiarize, Google will penalize you, and it harms your search engine result page rankings.

Some tools allow people to easily put their content and see if somebody else has plagiarized it. It is easy to find people who plagiarize, don’t be that person. I recommend you create a good content calendar and develop some ideas before you write them.

What are the types of content one can create?

You can create many types of content; here are some of them.

Blog posts

A blog is a blank canvas for ideas, thoughts, and opinions. That’s the great thing about a blog. It accentuates personality.

Video content

Videos are always engaging. According to a study by Wyzowl, 91% of customers want to see more online video content from brands.

Infographics

Infographics are hidden gems. Instead of somebody reading the same old thing, you are laying this out in a very visual way that’s easy to understand.

Case study

If you are a digital marketing expert, you have successfully helped a business attain its marketing and sales goals for a client, write about it, show the successes, and show that you are an expert.

White paper

White papers are good educational pieces that provide in-depth reports or guides about a topic or specific product.

Ebook

Ebooks allow a business to establish credibility and expertise. If you have a lot of content and want to lay it out, an ebook is an excellent way to do that.

What is a content calendar

A Content Calendar is a strategic tool that helps you plan and organize your content creation and distribution efforts. It allows you to map out the content you’ll be creating, the platforms you’ll use to distribute it, and the dates and times it will be published.

What are the benefits of having a content calendar?

It allows you to think about important dates

If you are planning something, you will have important dates in mind. A content calendar ensures you don’t miss anything that is an excellent opportunity to leverage, like Black Fridays and Cyber Mondays. You must know when those days are if you are in e-commerce. Having a content calendar helps you plan your content based on important dates or dates that work for your goals.

It helps you to stick to a consistent schedule

If you don’t have a content calendar, you probably arbitrarily write content here and there. If your users crave and engage with the content, they will want more. Sticking to something consistent will get people back for more. Once they know you will post, they will wait for it. If you post on a particular day or time of the week, keep to it, and your users will get used to that schedule. It does help build up your following. It does help build up your community and, ultimately, cultivates a long-lasting relationship.

It allows you to mix up your content

You can see and plan different types of content in various formats. That way, it will enable you to mix it up, whether it is a blog post, an infographic, or a video.

It is time-saving

A content calendar allows you to prepare for the future. When you can prepare, you are efficient; when you are efficient, you save time. A content calendar is a must because many of us are busy and don’t always have time. When you are into content creation, you want to have a content calendar because you will want to use your time to plan efficiently.

It helps you to figure out what works

Planning your posts puts less strain on you, your team members, and company resources because when you plan, it’s easier to get data on what is working and what is not. With the data, you know what to put and what not to put in the content calendar again.

It helps keep your content fresh

Having a content calendar allows you to always keep your content fresh. You will be on a consistent schedule, and you will not be writing about the same things repeatedly. A content calendar will help you regularly create fresh, new, and different content.

It helps you measure results

A content calendar makes it easier to measure results and optimize performance, so you always have to put some metrics in with your content calendar so you can see side-by-side content that performed and those that did not perform well.

What type of content to create at each stage of the customer lifecycle

Awareness stage

Here you want people to understand who you are. That could be guest blogs, social media posts, influencer content, shareable graphics, cold emails, videos, and GIFs.

Interest/Engagement stage

You want to build on the audience’s interest so that they keep engaging with your brand. To do that, you will create lighthearted content that resonates with your audience.

Evaluation stage

Here you create content to influence and help the prospective customer’s decision-making. That could be high-level content like blogs, case studies, testimonials, white papers, and case studies.

Purchase stage

When trying to get people to purchase, you can (1) Design landing pages, a user-friendly website, or a shopping cart with nice content. (2) Send emails to your list of prospective customers and get them to go to the website and purchase. (3) Have product and service details as well as one-page downloadable pdfs that describe the product etc.

Post-purchase stage

You can send out follow-up emails and do blog round-ups to allow people who purchased a product to see what features or updates are happening to the product. Case studies of repeat customers or content types that detail a new future service.

Advocacy stage

You want your customers to help you out here. Have user-generated content; have exclusive discounts for your community because they will be your advocates. Pictures of customers engaging with your products will encourage them to share the information. In other words, you can generate content where people can help you and be your advocates.

How to you choose what topic to write on?

Go to the content calendar

Content calendar always helps you see what nest to create content about and share with your target audience.

Do keyword research

You can do keyword research to know what’s trending and what keywords are not and write around what’s trending. Proper keyword research will help you choose topics you can be able to rank on Google for.

Look at forums

People are certainly having conversations on forums like Reddit and Quora. Analyze those conversations because they get in-depth, and you can decide if you want to create content around that. As a beginner, this is an excellent way to choose topics and create quality content that will rank on Google

Do competitor analysis

You can look at your competitors’ actions and the conversations on their blogs, social media platforms, and pages. You can keep track of blogs and articles from subject matter experts, commentators, critics, etc. You can get ideas from them.

How do you determine the tone of your content?

Look at the brand personality

The characteristics of a brand serve as the foundation for developing a content strategy. The tone of the content must correspond to the content strategy.

Look at your audience profile

Understanding who the audience is and how the brand wants to be perceived by the target audience are critical questions that influence the writing style and tone.

Consider your channels

Channels of distributing content are important determining factors of the tone to use, but regardless of that, the content you create must be consistent with brand attributes.

How to promote your content once it’s live?

After putting in the hard work to create content,

• Send an email broadcast: once a new piece of content is published, send an email broadcast to your email list to let people know this content is there and encourage them to click through. You are using email to broadcast and encourage people on your contact list to read the content.
• Engage with your community: use social media groups, content promotion networks, and online communities to promote your content with your community.
• Pay to promote: advertising your content on platforms like Facebook ads, google ads, Reddit ads, etc., helps your content get higher reach and impressions.
• Reach out on social media: targeting potential clients through social media will improve your content visibility.
• Write for others: attracting visitors from a competitor’s blog to important pages on your website by guest posting or blogging.

How to measure how well your content is doing?

At this point, you must have done all the work – put the content calendar together, created and published the content, and promoted it via social, email, and guest blogging but want to know how it’s doing.

Well, it depends on the channel

If it’s an organic search, you want to see if the content ranks for the keywords you optimized. Look at Google Analytics and see how much traffic that blog post or page with the white paper is getting.

If it’s social, we want to see if you have conversions, engagement, likes, shares, comments, etc. You will not likely get conversions unless you do paid ads if it’s social. You will probably get more engagement if you post organically on social media.

Look to see if conversions are in the form of an inquiry, lead, or sale. You have to align the KPI with the content and channel.

What are the steps involved in content marketing?

• Decide what goal you want to achieve with your content marketing campaign: if you have content that you posted on social, then what’s the purpose? What are you trying to achieve?
• Define buyer personas to understand the audience best suited for your content: you are always writing for an audience, and you will market that content for that audience, so you always have to keep that in mind.
• Understand the best type of content that can be used by running content audits: in other words, how did they perform, what kind of engagement did you get with the infographics, or did that video perform well, or do we want to use a blog post or an image next time around.
• Choose an appropriate content management system. For example, WordPress, Squarespace, Joomla, Wix, Drupal, Ghost, Magento, or any other platform.
• Brainstorm and do keyword research for ideas for new content: leverage your content calendar always to create ideas for new content.
• Create quality content that resonates with your audience.
• Publish and manage your content: Go back to analytics or KPIs aligned with the content to see if it’s performing.

How to target the right audience with content?

You are not writing content for everyone; let’s be honest here. So you have to collect the demographics of your target audience based on your website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.

You can segment your target audience based on the following: age, gender, education, income, and interest. You can do that in Google Analytics, on social media analytics, or by looking at your email list. All of those will paint a picture of who your target audience is.

Final thoughts

Businesses must stay informed and up-to-date on the latest trends and best practices in content marketing to stay ahead of the competition and achieve long-term success. Suppose you need professional hands to help you design an effective marketing funnel and create quality contents to grow your business. In that case, Our Experience team will provide the best guidance and services that meet your marketing needs. Get in touch to find out more.