No matter what service or product you provide, there's always customers somewhere online, especially on social media platforms. So, it's always a good idea to reconsider your strategy for content marketing to ensure that it's working as effectively as possible.
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing which focuses on creating and distributing copy on your website that attracts and retains prospective customers. And content marketing is never easy. It's hard work, it takes time, and there's no quick fixes or shortcuts.
The most effective content strategy will provide support for people on each side of your product or service. In other words, your content should be just as helpful for anyone who may still be unsure what their challenges are, as people who are already utilising your company to overcome their challenges.
Instead of relying on other forms of direct marketing and social advertising, this post will help bring new customers directly to you organically. This step-by-step guide can be used to create an effective content marketing strategy by helping with everything from setting achievable goals to evaluating the performance of your content. But first…
Who is DigiKat Marketing?
As a business growth agency that specialises in digital marketing, DigiKat Marketing can help you find success with solutions that drive leads, enhances engagement, and increase overall sales. Our solutions for sales and marketing have been explicitly designed to achieve remarkable results on the path to business success by working with you directly as your strategic partner. We can provide you with comprehensive business analysis, which includes our design, analytics, implementation, and content creation services.
As a HubSpot Dimond Partner, we are perfectly placed to assist you in improving your marketing performance. DigiKat Marketing can help you achieve this by building personalised solutions for marketing and sales, which are optimised specifically for the best possible performance, increased lead generation, and consistent improvement.
Your Audience & Personas
As most successful content marketers understand, simply creating copy using whatever comes to mind is never going to be good enough to convert. Instead, content needs to be written specifically for whatever their intended audience are actually searching for. The best way to achieve this is by looking at your company from their perspective and creating individual and specific personas for each type of your ideal customers.
These semi-fictional audience personas are representations of your ideal shoppers based on different types of research and data so that you can better understand your target audience on a deeper level. This information is essential when creating the most engaging content, as it will ensure you know who you should be targeting, supporting, and working hardest to reach to increase brand loyalty and boost your conversions.
Once you have your descriptions of audience personas set up accurately, you'll then be able to determine exactly where you should be guiding product development, while always focusing your efforts on the most suitable prospects. As a result, you'll understand your customers better, which means you can anticipate their buying behaviours and create targeted content which draws them in and keeps them returning.
There are three aspects you need to know when creating your personas which will attract the highest-value visitors and leads, which are as follows:
The Problem
Your product or service should ideally solve a problem that you know your target audience is wanting solved. So it is essential your content identifies this problem before addressing, coaching, and educating your audience about it.
The Need
Rather than creating content about your products and your services, you need to ensure that it is focused on their specific needs. This targeted content can actually help you to create a market niche for your business which identifies you as an expert, which will often result in your customers rewarding you for it.
The Solution
Your content on your website needs to guide readers in a naturally cohesive way which reinforces your solutions while also making sure your customers become more qualified users and brand ambassadors of your product.
Use the persona creation tool from HubSpot to create your ideal personas.
Your Content Stages
Having content for each stage is key to moving a lead through the customer journey, which will ultimately convert lookers into purchasers. The various steps account for each of the different stages of each buyer's journey, with targeted content tailored and served to them throughout their purchasing lifecycle. This methodology ultimately allows you to identify buyer personas to provide a solution for them through content stages of enticing engagement.
There are four main content stages which you should think about to help your business grow. These are listed below:
Attract - Social, Blogs,
Engage - eBooks, Webinars
Convert - Testimonials, Case studies
Delight - Email updates, Tutorials, Customer success
Utilising the marketing tactic of these content stages will enable you to attract more prospective customers to your website. This positive relationship starts at initial contact and continues once they become a returning customer so that you can continue to support them throughout their engagement. This will help accelerate and increase your conversions via customer referrals and earned marketing, because you should always be focused on how you can help both potential and existing customers alike.
These content stages will ultimately provide you with the best means of directing your reach while also enhancing the implementation of your content strategy. By focusing on creating content stages that are fully optimised for both online searches as well as social media, you will cover all bases when it comes to attracting the most relevant prospects. That's because content stages which have been highlighted and specified to target your ideal buyer personas, it keeps them engaged throughout each of the steps of Attract, Engage, Convert, and Delight.
Content Schedule
Now that you have more understanding about what content you need, it's time to start putting it out there. But once it's created, you don't want to post everything all at once. Instead, what you need to do is plan how many posts you are going to post each week on your socials, how many blogs per month you are going to put out, etc. Then use a tool that will allow you to post everything on autopilot. By simplifying your content schedule, you can focus on distribution, lead management and recording, as well as measuring things like ROI.
HubSpot has an excellent tool that allows you to plan and schedule all your blog, website, and social media posts in advance. This means you can determine which content will be shared, on what date, on which platform, while also providing clarity about project details, managing numerous campaigns, and tracking multiple deadlines. Rather than stifling your creativity, it can become a continuing source of inspiration for content, while also giving you the time that you need to grow your business without being concerned about daily posting.
Content scheduling means you can define a specific publishing schedule for your content which can be weeks, months, or even years in advance. With a solid social media calendar and content schedule you can align each post with your overall objectives of time efficiency and post consistency.
HubSpot has a variety of content scheduling tools which provides you with content management systems and other information which can be used to not only produce templates, but also develop, schedule, and post your content. The more you learn how to use these tools, the more insight you will be able to gather for content streams on each specific platform. You can then set up reporting which tracks what content is working and what content isn't based on the following three areas:
Planning
Planning content that will be posted in the future is one of the most common elements of successful marketing strategies as it allows you to build fail-safes into workflows. From editing and fact-checking copy information to vetting it with stakeholders, content creation is always going to be much easier when you're doing it ahead of time in bulk.
Automating
Putting everything together in advance and automating it eliminates the pressure on you to post it all in real-time. Automation streamlines your social presence puts you back in control of your workflow schedule so that you can stay focused on the rest of your most important tasks.
Reporting
Whether you're trying to measure progress for yourself or you're presenting analytics to teams, clients, or other stakeholders, tracking metrics by creating reports is key to having a complete picture of performance. Creating intuitive monthly social media reports is easily one of the most effective methods of keeping track of growth and improving social media content strategy.
Tools
Below are a few tools we use with our clients to build and create content.
HubSpot Marketing Pro
This all-in-one marketing software from HubSpot provides you with effective tools that can help with blogging, social media, landing pages, marketing automation, web analytics, emails, and SEO. HubSpot Marketing Pro can also help you increase traffic in order to convert website and social media visitors into repeat customers, while also manage complete marketing campaigns which can be easily scaled as required.
DigiKat Content Planning tool
Our content planning tool is available to help you organise and streamline all aspects of your digital marketing, which will ultimately ensure that your creative process is a lot easier and much more organised. It guides you through the entire content planning process.
Blog Post idea tool
HubSpot's Blog Post idea tool allows you to input three different nouns before providing you with five ideas for blog topics. This powerful and effective blog topic generator will help kick start inspiration and really get your creative juices flowing, ensuring that you are always creating enticing, fresh, and clickable content.
How can DigiKat Marketing Help?
Without an effective strategy, your content marketing is surely doomed to fail. But, armed with a long-term strategy, you can ensure that your content marketing has direction and purpose, which ensures it is always focused on your audience and your business.
DigiKat Marketing can help you with a free 30-day HubSpot trial for content management and marketing automation. Not only will we show you how it works, but you will then understand firsthand precisely how much the right content strategy can increase inbound lead generation for your business. We also offer our free SEO and Website Audit, which will show you where you need to make changes so that you rank higher on search engines like Google.
Once you have a great content strategy that works, you can create the kind of consistency that will ultimately help you build a loyal audience while also ensuring you're never wasting resources on poorly written content. After all, content marketing has always been about building closer relationships with your audience, and the fulfilment that comes with knowing you've helped your audience when they've needed it the most.
