Content Marketing: A Professional Guide

In today’s time, people study a lot on the internet before selecting a product/service — learning about the product, along with checking feedback and referrals. Yet, ultimately the purchase comes down to which company or brand they trust the most. However, just developing a great product/service is not good enough for this outcome — reaching the right audience which has the possibility of buying your product in a trustworthy manner holds even more water. Content marketing is essentially the marketing strategy to do this with the help of the internet — producing and distributing valuable, suitable, and meaningful content to draw and develop your target audience.

What is content marketing?

According to The Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience — with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

The keyword here is “valuable” — what value you bring to the lives of your viewers is what dictates whether they can pursue or ignore it via your official website/blog. Instead of writing about how great your brand is, through content marketing, you help your viewers to gain knowledge about a type of product when they study it. That is where content marketing techniques vary from the conventional type of advertisement — by not really being commercial, you are promoting the brand.

How to do content marketing?

Below you will find the methodologies that the best content marketing agencies implement -

• Set your goal — decide why you are doing content marketing:

If you don’t understand the requirements of your business, it will be impossible for you to explain it to others. So first understand your own product/service well — the unique selling point (USP) of your product/service, the objectives of your business, your unique branding style, and your business requirements. You need to grasp well why you are planning to delve into content marketing. Once you are clear on all these, only then you will be able to plan an effective content marketing strategy.

• Narrow down your target audience and learn about them:

No matter what your product/service is and no matter how great it is, it is never going to be used by 100% of the population — it will always attract only a particular portion of the audience and your marketing strategy must be targeted towards this particular group alone, to make it profitable. Consult a seasoned digital marketing agency in Melbourne who can guide you in acquiring a deep understanding of your target audience and determine a content marketing strategy accordingly -

• You should know the preferred communication platform (mostly social media) of your target audience and the time they come online,
• If your kind of audience has a special “lingo” that resonates more, you should be aware of it and be well-versed in it.
• Demographics — by geographical location, age, gender, etc. You can use various research tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Insights to collect this data.
• You should know how your audience is distinguished from others based on the types of acts or behaviours of them.
• You should research the market for similar products/services as yours and collect data on their biggest customer base.

Once you are clear on what kind of audience you are targeting, it is smart to create a personality of audience based on the data. This way, the content you write will be much more relevant to the type of people you wish to attract.

• Optimize your content for search engines:

One of the first things the best digital marketing agencies in Melbourne look at is your brand’s online presence, and optimise it for the search engines; since this is the first step towards being noticed by old, new, or potential buyers. First of all, you need to have an official website which will have all information about your product/service along with means to contact your company. The content together with the architecture of this website will be optimised for search engines by your SEO team. Your digital marketing agency will conduct outreach marketing with promotional and non-promotional content from blogs on your website as well as guest posts, social media posts, video posts on various websites in your industry’s niche. A good content marketing agency in Melbourne will also have a reputation management team who will take care of all the brand mentions for you.

• Social media marketing:

Any top digital marketing agency in Melbourne will advise you that some of the most effective tools in today’s era are social media. You can use them for brand recognition as well as a conversion if your social media outreach is well-designed and well-implemented. You can learn more about your target audience using social media that you can incorporate in your product design, and you can interact with them on a personal level that allows them to click on your CTA button more.

• Influencer marketing:

If you have consulted any content marketing agency, you will know that influencer marketing is one of the major fields of marketing in the age of social media. In this method, you reach out to macro-, micro-, and nano-influencers to promote your brand. Although macro-influencers such as celebrities can be too costly, but micro and nano-influencers from your industry’s niche may agree to work with you in return for a free product/service. As a matter of fact, they may be more valuable to you as their fan base has already put their trust in them, and a big percentage of this fan base may already be your target audience itself.

• Decide on what to post — be experimental:

In the 21st century, your potential customers have a huge plethora of information available to them, so the quantity of content rarely interests them — it’s the quality of content that they are looking for. Consult skilled professionals from a reputed content marketing agency in Melbourne who can develop quality content in written as well as image and video form that will reach the highest number of your target audience. Nevertheless, remember, technology and people’s methods of intaking information are changing every day. So don’t be afraid to be creative and experimental.

• Be personal:

The world today is almost entirely digital and so impersonal, and human touch is lacking for all of us. That is why one of the best content marketing strategies in this era is to allow a personalised approach to your content that will bring direct value to your potential customers. Send emails customised to your customers (especially returning ones), with personalised content both on the subject line as well as the body; reply to both positive and negative comments and reviews from your customers; and inspire their engagement by giveaways, discounts, contests, referral codes and cashback, polls and discussion groups etc.

• Monitor, evaluate, and upgrade:

At every point of your business career, you will need to have a check on your product/service — if it is resonating in your expected manner with your target audience and how you can improve it, ideas for introducing new or similar products/services, and grow as a business in the process. The digital marketing agency that you hire should have a separate team working on the various metrics of your content marketing success — the traffic to your site, onsite engagement of visitors on your pages, your social media performance, the outcomes of your SEO team’s efforts, your brand’s online reputation, the number of conversions which includes sales as well as lead generation, and the number of returning visitors. They then calculate and present to you the exact ROI from your content marketing efforts and advise on how to improve it further.

Conclusion

An effective content marketing campaign requires time, coordination, and innovation to develop. Setting up your strategy for the new year will not be a headache if you follow the steps described here. However, whenever in doubt, especially if you are inexperienced in the business, it is always best to hire a well-trained and reputable content marketing agency in Melbourne to take care of the whole process.