4 Essential Content Marketing Principles we all need to Master in 2022

Knowing your audience and the story that appeals to them is key to winning at content marketing. I read a book that opened my eyes to concepts that work and I want to share them with you.

What’s that saying again? “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Sir Isaac newton’s famous humility speech. This has definitely been my story since 2021.

A key principle that I have found that outweighs the rest is to:

NEVER STOP LEARNING.

I can definitely say that I have learned A LOT from different blogs, Twitter, slack groups, and other avenues that I will be highlighting later on. BUT, there’s nothing as satisfying and anxiety dissuading as an EBOOK that has all you need in one place. This is what Folasade and Benjamin’s book was to me and I’m here to give you the juicy gist that makes this book phenomenal, at least to me. I can’t possibly say a lot on this blog because the book is so packed, so you’d gain more if you get your copy here.

Before we jump into the principles, I want to give a quick definition of what content marketing is, that is, if this is your first time hearing those words.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing simply means, getting the attention and earning the trust of an audience through the distribution of useful, valuable, and consistent online materials such as ebooks, blogs, social media posts, email newsletters, courses etc. with the aim of building trust which will organically drive the target audience to either patronize your business or share to others who might.

That’s a mouthful, I know. But trust me, this is the full gist.

Here are the principles:

Principle 1: The Art of Storytelling.

I love the way Folasade broke this storytelling thing down. She said you should “see a story as your tool for showing potential customers your products will benefit them.” and I agree. Storytelling is an art because it is learned. The best way I can explain it is by using a practical example.

Let’s take PiggyVest for instance. Your favourite Nigerian Fintech company.

They came in with a great story that helped them penetrate the heart of Nigerians and the story goes:

“Piggyvest started as a result of a viral tweet we saw on the 31st of December, 2015. Someone had saved ₦1,000 every day that year in a kolo (Yoruba word meaning piggy bank).

On the last day of the year, she broke the box and shared the picture on Twitter. We saw the tweet and discussed it internally and decided to build something like it.

It was a simple idea — a product that allows you automatically save daily, weekly or monthly and gives you back your money after 3 months with some interest.”

I lifted this from an article from none other than the Benjamindada.com:

This story perfectly depicts 4 things:

A. The goal the customer wants to achieve: Savings is the goal.

B. How will the product solve the problem that keeps them from achieving this goal: The product will provide an easily accessible & safe avenue to make savings feel as easy as slipping a 1000 naira note into a Kolo.

C. How the product is helping the customer achieve that goal: Giving them an Automatic savings platform where they can save daily, weekly or monthly. Better than the Kolo and even doing more by giving them their money after 3 months with some interest.

D. What life will look like after your brand has intervened: The user would have built wealth that they can channel to any project in their life or simply just buy Suya 1 million. If I broke na my business, abi?

This is the framework of a story that draws people in.

Principle 2: Telling the right stories.

How do you do this? It’s simple, first understand the goal of establishing the business, and to do that you must know who you’re here to serve. This simply means you must go knee-deep into serious research about the audience you want to serve.

In the case of PiggyVest, they came into the market to make savings — a pain point for most Nigerians — as easy as downloading an app and automating the savings process in minutes. The goal was to make savings easy and more sustainable without all the crazy bottlenecks and charges of a traditional bank.

Great! They have the right ammunition, now it’s time to settle 3 things before unleashing their story:

A. The buyer persona and the buyer’s journey: A buyer’s persona is a detailed and specific description of one (or more) potential customers that the business wants to target. The buyer’s journey on the other hand tries to trace the process the buyer goes through before deciding to make a purchase.

Let’s create a quick buyer persona for PiggyVest.

Diana is 23 and working as a content marketer for a tech startup. When she’s not being a badass at her job she loves to explore new restaurants. To do this, she needs to consistently save monthly towards her monthly adventures.

Here is her journey as a buyer. She first goes online and googles “the best way to save up for a goal in Nigeria”. She searches through and discovers PiggyVest, a stress-less savings app. She sees that she can save and also get returns, cool! She’s now left with a decision to make. Do I trust these people with my hard-earned money or just be on the safe side and get kolo. She dives deeper and finds a testimonial video that convinces her that the app is trusted. She downloads the app and starts saving.

She went from Awareness to Consideration to Decision

B. Align with the business goals: For example, imagine your marketing team’s goal is to generate leads for a particular product over six months. Aligning with this goal means focusing on creating content for the middle and bottom-funnel stages i.e. Consideration and Decision stage. Here, you are thinking about creating content like webinars, templates, free trials, and so on.

C. Do a Content assessment: If the business has previous content it is important to audit what is already in the content bank and decide if there are any gaps that need to be filled. This means you also want to look for other content formats you don’t already have but will be useful in achieving this goal of increasing awareness.

Principle 3: Share your story on the right platforms, consistently.

Again, to know the right platform to share the content on, you must know where your audience is. How do you do that? Research, Research, Research with a sprinkle of testing and experimenting.

By this time, you should already have your content strategy fleshed out. Every good content strategy should have a research stage, content creation stage, and distribution stage.

Folasade puts it this way:

“Before you start creating content, think about the people you’re making it for. While you’re writing your outline, write your plan for sharing it.”

What this means is — you ought to create, plan and share with your audience in mind. It is so key to know your audience and the channels they prefer. Because, how else will you reach them with what they are looking for, right?

These 3 channels will guide your choice:

• Paid Channels: This includes pay-per-click (PPC) and Influencer marketing, just to name a few.
• Shared Channels: This is when third parties share your content for free, from mentions to retweets, to shares, reviews, and guest posts.
• Owned Channels: These are channels under the control of your business. Website, blog, email newsletters, and social media — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

Principle 4: Track your progress, and measure your efforts.

It is true insanity to spend all this time creating amazing content and then just throw it out there “hoping” for good results. This is not a lottery. To consistently make great and high-ranking content, it requires critically looking at your content marketing efforts to understand what’s working and what isn’t — even if this means you have less time to publish new content.

Few Metrics you can start with are:

• Organic Search Traffic: This is the number of people that come to your website when someone searches for something on Google, Bing etc.
• Time spent on page: This shows how fast people leave your page/website after arriving there. This could be your website, blog, or even social media.
• Keywords ranking: Choosing the appropriate keyword for your piece is an extreme sport, you’ll want to check whether it ranks well on the search engine.
• Newsletter signups: If you want to adopt email newsletters (which I recommend!) Then measuring the number of people that subscribe to the newsletter can be an important metric to help track your content marketing efforts.

3 final noteworthy points:

Whatever you do, try and incorporate SEO (Search engine optimization). Folasade puts it this way; write for humans, optimize for bots. Research should be your best friend.

Keep your KPI (Key performance indicator) in view at all times and understand that your content marketing must match your business goals — which are centered on turning prospects into paying clients.

Follow and stay updated with content marketing trends. Do this by keeping up with blogs and newsletters from Storychief, Hubspot, Semrush, Content marketing Institute just to name a few. Then groups: Marketing Twitter on Twitter (I highly recommend), Techmarketers & Superpath on Slack, then Adp list (you can find mentorship in Content Marketing here). These are great places to start.

Period.

I didn’t necessarily go into the nitty-gritty details about content marketing because it’s a lot. These few principles I mentioned are simply some essential facts you can’t miss if you want to take content marketing seriously.

Huge thanks to Folasade and Ben for putting together the best book on Content Marketing I’ve read so far.

If you get the book you will find out more about how to land your first content marketing job, essential tools for content marketing, email marketing essentials, SEO best practices, best blog strategies, and soooo much more.

As my fave — bugs bunny — would always say, “that’sss all folks!”

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