Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing

Each year, each week, and sometimes each day that goes by, social media is changing and updating before our eyes. If we want our content to succeed and be relevant, we need to constantly tweak our content.

In this blog we are going to take a deep dive into content marketing and how you can be sure your content is the best quality it can be!

What Is Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is a technique based on…

CREATE ▶️ PUBLISH ▶️ SHARE

Content designed with your ideal customer in mind, that is your buyer persona.

This marketing technique is used to attract users with content to inform, train, entertain, or inspire, always around topics associated with your brand or business. 

Applying a content marketing strategy helps you to position yourself as an expert in your industry.

Pay attention to all of the necessary steps for Content marketing to ensure that you reach positive results.  

Let’s get started.

How To Get Started With Your Content Marketing

💥 You must know what type of audience you want to target.

💥 Decide what you want to share.

💥 Think about the best format to transmit what you want to say.

What Type of Content Should You Post?

Deciding which types of content will best represent your brand and what message you are trying to get across to your audience. Some examples include:

📌 Blog articles

📌 Images and graphics

📌 Short-form video content

📌 YouTube tutorials

📌 Infographics

📌 Podcasts

📌 Written guides

📌 Webinars

Promotional Channels for Your Content

Choosing which networks or channels will best represent your brand is important as well. A big misconception is that you must be on every channel. This is untrue. You must find out where your target audience scrolls and consumes information and be sure to be active on those platforms.

📌 Blog/Website

📌 Social Media: YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc.

📌 Email/Newsletter

📌 Reviews, forums, guest posts

📌 Social media advertising

📌 Influencer marketing

What Is The Main Objective of Content Marketing?

The purpose of content marketing is to attract and maintain future customers through sharing valuable and relevant content. 

Why Should You Use Content Marketing?

Content Marketing is an inbound technique that attracts your ideal audience through quality content that can help them solve an issue, gain motivation, or become a powerful resource.

Google’s algorithm also values the content that helps users to find what they are searching for. Google prioritizes the educational and informational type of marketing approach, rather than leaning heavily on promotional content solely for driving sales.

Here are a few tips to consider when building and executing your content marketing strategy:

✅ Post up-to-date content

✅ Valuable and relevant information for users

✅ Resourceful content, not just to improve your brand’s position

✅ Sharing content across multiple channels to boost awareness

Content Marketing Strategy Steps

To carry out an effective content marketing strategy, we highly recommend following these steps:

Step 1- Planning

Since you already know what a content plan is based on, you probably know that the first step to designing a good content marketing strategy is to prepare a content plan [Blog content plan & social media content plan for example] and create an editorial calendar.

This way, you will have what you need to publish each day organized and under control.

Step 2- Choose Your Channels

Which channels you can use when you start your content marketing strategy?

⏩ Company blog

This is the main channel for content marketing, and it’s the preferred choice for companies to share their content. Writing a blog brings multiple advantages to a marketing strategy:

• It improves your organic ranking on Google.
• It helps you to gain authority in the industry and position your company as an expert.
• Create valuable and useful content for your users, they will go to your blog to solve their questions, increasing the chances of converting them into real customers.
• It generates conversions, and many of the articles contain the information that users need to make the final purchasing decision.
• Helps you gain more visibility.

If you decide to start a blog as part of your content marketing strategy, first you must create a content plan and an editorial calendar so you never run out of publications.

Are you ready?

This post will help you along the way…

⏩ Social Media

If you have a blog already, you need to do something else apart from publishing articles and wait until they improve their ranking to increase the traffic. Social media can help increase the traffic to your blog and website, as well as start to build an online community.

It’s crucial to be active on social channels. It’s a way to make sure your followers have fresh and updated content available in their feeds. A good way to do it without dying in the attempt is through automated processes. 

How can you promote your content on social networks? 

Check this example:

If you are looking to make your work on Twitter, and social media as a whole easier, watch this video and learn how to create and schedule Twitter threads using Metricool. 🐦https://t.co/0axSMPc4dH

— Metricool EN ∞ (@Metricool) November 30, 2023

Once you start publishing on your blog and social platforms, you can start varying the format of your content, including videos, photos, infographics, etc. You can also set up a YouTube channel or open a digital ad account. 

Step 3- Inbound Marketing

This probably sounds familiar at this point. The thing is that there are other types of marketing strategies that are very similar to content marketing… and likely the same strategy came to your mind, Inbound Marketing.

However, did you know that you can mix both strategies?

If you put both content and inbound marketing strategies together, you can even get more benefits and advantages out of them. You might have heard of Outbound Marketing as well, which is another marketing strategy that focuses on more direct tactics. Don’t know which one to use for your brand?

How to Carry Out a Content Marketing Strategy

After creating your content plan and editorial calendar, the next step is to start creating the content and give it life. Below, you can find some factors to keep in mind when you start generating your content to guarantee the success of your strategy:

Content Marketing Funnel

The first thing you should do is create your content marketing funnel. To do this you will visualize what your potential customers or clients’s process will be when considering purchasing something from you. This is an outline of your customer or client’s journey. This will help you create the best content that will convert to sales.

Size and Formatting of Content

Rule number one for these types of strategies is to focus as much as possible on users, so you must adapt what you want to communicate to the channel that you are going to use.

⏩ For a blog, write posts with between 500 and 1000 words, it’s ok if it’s longer as long as the length is justified. 

⏩ Vary the formats, for example: Videos photos, or infographics stand out more than 500 words on social networks.

Writing the Content

The way you write and express yourself is crucial. It will get more or less attention from your users depending on how the text is written.

You must adapt the content to the goals and the audience you want to reach.

Don’t you know where to start?

Consider adding some evergreen content throughout each of your platforms. Evergreen content is content that persists over time, that is, it doesn’t have an expiration date and can’t become obsolete.

Another fundamental part of the content is the title. It’s the first thing that users will see, so pay attention to it and choose carefully the title of your publications. 

✅ Make sure you use titles that capture the attention. 

✅ Create striking titles for your articles.

Calls-To-Action

In both your blog and the content shared on social networks or other channels, it’s important to include calls to action.

It helps users to understand which action is expected for them to take. That is the action that you want them to take once they reach your content. 

This call-to-action must be created properly, you must state clearly what users have to do and it must be written persuasively and convincingly to get conversions.

🔔 However, You must be smooth in your calls-to-action, don’t be too aggressive. 

Content Promotion

We all know how efficient Google Search Engine is and that it helps to position our content and get more visibility. However, there are other ways to reach a bigger audience…

In order to increase your visibility, it is necessary that you encourage people to read and see your content and for that, you need to use other channels…

🔀 Social Networks: As we mentioned before, social platforms will help your content to go viral, and therefore, reach a wider audience. 

🔀 Advertising: By creating ads on Google Ads and on other social networks (Instagram Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and LinkedIn Ads), you will get far. You will promote your content and increase the traffic. 

🔀 Influencer Marketing: Influencer Marketing relates to communication or marketing actions carried out by influencers. An influencer is any person or figure that has the ability to affect the behavior of their followers through social networks, blogs, or other digital media. 

These types of posts will help improve your ranking, make your brand more famous in the industry, and impact positively on your conversion rate.

Optimize Your Web Page

Although a content marketing strategy is mostly focused on the content created and shared, you must optimize your website too if you want to reach your goals. 

Once you drive users to your blog from social networks or Google, they will already be on your site and they will probably browse the rest of the pages to learn more about your business: products/services, prices, team, etc.

If you optimize your website you could guide your customers where you want them to go and click the buttons you want them to push.

A major challenge marketers face is the ability to collect and analyze information from multiple online sources on their customers, communities, and audiences in one place so that they can quickly gain insight into what is working.

Examples of a Content Marketing Strategy

You can observe that Metricool follows a content strategy implementing different formats and channels to promote it. Here is a short summary…

➡️ We share the content of our blog on all social networks.

➡️ Besides, we have a YouTube channel with video tutorials about our tool and where we include related content.

➡️ We provide complete marketing guides to help users.

Content marketing strategies can be constantly carried out during the whole year. Click the button below to be let in on some content strategy secrets!

So this is all, hope this helps to optimize your content marketing strategy and reach your goals.

And before finishing the article here is our Mega Tutorial where we explain, in depth, all of our features!

Any questions?

Sara Martín , 01 December 2023