Using a Content Strategy To Drive Your Business

Content marketing is everywhere - all brands from big to small are doing it. Even the cafe down the road is constantly posting to Instagram, writing blog posts and getting reviews written. The big companies spend enormous budgets on content marketing yearly.

 

Content marketing is great because, when done well, it produces inbound leads. When a potential customer comes to you themselves with a problem they want solved, making the sale in this circumstance is easy. Compare this to outbound sales where you’re constantly doing lead generation, prospecting and trying to convince a customer they need what you’re selling.

 

So how do you do content marketing well? There are many different moving pieces, such as identifying where your potential customers spend their time and what medium you can reach them with. One thing you’ll definitely need is a good content strategy. At Contento we do a lot of content marketing and have produced a guide to help you create a content marketing strategy.

 

Why do you need it? Because it provides a structure and a process, as well as saving you time. Without it you’re basically shooting in the dark.

 

It consists of many parts, including:

• Audience information - How to determine your audience and buyer persona.
• Topics - Find problems that your customers have that you can produce content on.
• Content formats - The content you create has to be native to the platform it’s distributed on.
• Channels - How to choose between blogs, social media and half a dozen other platforms.
• Creation and publication implementation - Either create it yourself or outsource.
• Content calendar - Keep yourself accountable and on track with a calendar.
• Promotion - How to increase the reach of each piece of content.
• Analytics & tracking - Analyse what works well and what doesn’t for next time.

 

You can read more here in our content strategy guide.