Content marketing efforts fall into three categories:
- There are those businesses new to content marketing and are just not certain how to do it right
- There are those businesses who have been engaged in content marketing for some time now and are seeing at least some results
- There are those businesses who began a content marketing campaign and process and who gave up on it because they saw no results.
There are a number of amazing tools available for content marketing efforts and new ones are created continuously. But before any tools can be considered, a business must assess where it is in the 4-step process of developing a content marketing campaign.
Planning
If you are new to content marketing, you have to make a decision as to who is going to create and distribute the content. If you are already implementing a campaign, the decisions may relate to adding team members or contracting some of the content writing and distribution out.
The other aspect of planning is defining your target market, or developing a persona demographic of your customer. For the beginner, this means figuring out who your customer is and where that customer "hangs out" online, so s/he can be targeted with the content you create. If you have already been targeting your market well, you should still re-visit that demographic yearly - things change. If you are one who has dumped your campaign, you might want to think about how you developed our customer persona and how you geared distribution of your content to be where they are. Were there mistakes?
Tools for Planning
Smart Custom Writing: This site is a comprehensive writing service that has large departments in professional and web-based copywriting. They have excellent content creators as well as the expertise to develop part or all of a content marketing campaign.
3Q Digital: This group makes sense of Google Analytics. Using the Google Analytics Audience tab is a great way to develop a target persons - to find out who they are, where they are located, and when. It reports "Affinity Audiences" (based upon interests, lifestyles and habits) and an "In-Market" profile of people who are actually searching for what you are selling. These reports can be difficult to interpret, but 3Q Digital will break it all down for you in easily readable format, giving you direction for content ultimate content distribution.
Content Creation
Now that you know who is going to write and who and where your audience is, you need to focus on the content that will be written and the platforms for writing it. Here are your options for creating content:
Blogs: This is the most common platform for content marketing, and, if you can drive visitors to your blog, you have a major marketing thrust going. Your blog content should place you into the role of an expert in your business niche as well as give readers opportunities to be entertained, inspired, and, to participate. Assuming you have great writers, the only challenge is to come up with content ideas. Good blog posts are "how to" (either in print or video), lists, and other media, such as infographics.
Premium (aka Gated) Content: This is content that you offer to visitors that usually requires them to provide an email for access - downloads of e-books or guides, access to webinars, etc. Ideas for content can be found by combining several blog posts, by perusing competitors' websites, and by performing deep searches.
Visual/Interactive Content: This type of content is particularly engaging for visitors - videos, photos, infographics, surveys, quizzes, especially if they are able to interact with the content in some way. These have traditionally required designers with coding skills, but not anymore.
Tools for Content Creation
Trap!t: This is a terrific content idea search tool. You can enter a keyword/phrase and create a "trap." Using artificial intelligence, the tool searches over 100,000 content sources and delivers the most relevant content to you trap. You can create as many traps as you wish. And, as you access your trap for your ideas you can give a "thumbs-up" or a "thumbs-down" to specific pieces, and that will be so noted for future content selections.
Info.Gram: If you think you have to hire a skilled designer for your visual content, think again. Here is a tool for creating pictures, infographics, interactive visuals, videos, and more. This is truly "design for dummies" and truly easy to use. The other great little feature? Tools for social sharing are built into what you design automatically.
Distribution
The great content has been created. Now to distribute everywhere that is relevant to your target market.
Search Engines
There are a couple of ideas around this:
- If you publish on a regular basis, search engines can actually function as a channel of distribution, provided you have done the right research for keywords and optimized that content for searches. If you use WordPress with the right plug-ins, you will be able to see whether the content of a blog is optimized, and you will have the right sharing buttons on all of your published posts.
- Distribution is a separate function than content creation, and the creators do not necessarily know how to distribute well. You will need to have the right tools to do this.
Social Media
In addition to search engines, the other huge distribution network is social media. The more shares you get on the content you post on social media also influences Google's rankings. It only makes sense to be on all social media that relate to your niche - certainly Facebook for starters. Using the analytics you got on your target audience from your planning stage, you should also know what other social media outlets you should be using to reach that audience.
Growing your email list through a lot of avenues just makes sense. Readers should always have the opportunity to subscribe to your blog; grow your list through gated content as well.
Distribution Tool
Buffer: This is a super-simple way to get your content shared on all of your social media platforms. You can schedule when and to which channels you want the content posted, and, with recent enhancements, this includes photos, other media and videos. You can also schedule re-shares of older posts/content, or schedule your newest content to be shared several times a day on the same channel.
MailChimp: This is a bonus tool recommendation. This tool is totally free (if you have less than 2000 people on your list), and you can set up delivery of all of your content or just specific content that you create only for email to all of your contacts or just a grouping. Nothing could be easier.
Measuring Your Success
You can measure a lot of your success on your own. For example, are subscriptions to your blog increasing? Are more visitors going through your "gates" to download things? Are your social media follower numbers increasing? And, most important, are you seeing increase in sales? The key to all of this is not to become discouraged early on. Content marketing, as those of you who are engaged in it know, is a process and a rather lengthy one at that. It takes time for your content to be spread and for people to learn to trust you. That said, there is something to be said for using Google analytics, because the information may inform decisions about where to place emphasis and where to improve. And that said, it takes some skill to generate the right reports and then to interpret them. Enter the final tool recommendation:
QuillEngage: you can choose which reports you want - all of them if you choose - and the folks at QuillEngage will analyze them and send you an easy to read report written in plain language that you can understand. Yes, this is a paid tool, but if you are serious about analytics and don't have or want to take the time to do it yourself, this is the answer.
You may be using other tools that you think are great - let us know!