Content Marketing: A Beginner's Guide

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Today I bring you a guide to Content Marketing in which we will see: characteristics, examples in social networks and how to design a good plan.

Your potential customers and members of your audience want valuable content. And that content needs to reach your audience members in a way that feels natural and organic rather than disruptive.

Content marketing helps businesses do this and describes the process of attracting, interacting, and satisfying their target markets.

Let's start!

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience.

You can generate factors like brand awareness, sales, reach, interactions, and loyalty.

How to make the content authentic and engaging?

Currently, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren't as effective at resonating and converting audience members as they once were.

Today, your content needs to reach your audience in a way that feels natural. A common way to do this is to create a story for your content or tell a story. By doing this, your content will be more authentic, engaging, and relevant to your audience.

Why is content creation important?

Some of the benefits offered by content marketing are:

1.- Inform your potential customers about the products and services you offer.

2.- Boost conversions.

3.- Build relationships between your customers and your business which translate into greater loyalty.

4.- Show your audience your products / services and how they can solve their problems.

5.- Create a spirit of community around your brand and on your social networks.

And many other advantages that you will already discover!

Now let's take a look at the different types of Content Marketing ...

Types of content marketing

There are several types of content marketing that you can choose to incorporate into your digital marketing strategy.

Here are some of the most common types of content marketing:

1.- Content Marketing with Blogs

Blogs are a powerful type of inbound content and allow a lot of creativity in terms of purpose and topic.

With a blog, you can do things like promote other internal and external content and blog posts through links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information.

2.- Video content marketing

Video marketing can drive conversions, improve ROI, and help you build relationships with your audience members. You can choose to share your video content on social media platforms, pages of destination or a common merchant's website.

Create your own YouTube channel is still an alternative that can do wonders for your business.

To learn more about this method of content marketing, read our beginner's guide to creating quality videos for YouTube.

3.- Content marketing with paid advertising

Paid advertising can help you reach a large audience and to position yourself in all the places where you want to be seen.

The ads paid are particularly beneficial when combined with inbound marketing. There are plenty of places you can post paid ads, including on social media, landing pages, banners, and sponsored content.

This way, you can sign up as an advertiser and publish your ads so that the right people see what you are offering, and thus increase your sales!

4.- Content marketing in social networks

With over 3,6 billion social media users worldwide, it's easy to see why so many companies are investing in social media marketing.

There are multiple platforms (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Snapchat) to work with and different ways to create and share content on each of them (e.g. photos, live videos, pre-recorded videos, stories).

5.- Podcast content marketing

A 2020 survey found that 49% of young people aged 12 to 32 in the United States had listened to a podcast in the past month, with an average of six hours of listening per week. For this reason, many companies and media have started to create and share their own podcasts.

Podcasts allow a lot of creativity, as they can cover any topic you want. In addition, you determine other factors related to the podcast, such as the theme and frequency of episodes, who is in the podcast, where you are advertising the podcast, and how long the episodes are.

6.- Infographic on content marketing

Infographics display content, information, and data in an easy-to-understand graphical format.

With a combination of simple words, short statements, and clear images, infographics are a great way to effectively communicate your content. They work well if you are trying to summarize an educational or complex topic so that everyone in the audience can understand it.

Examples of content marketing

The following examples will give you a better understanding of how you can integrate content into your marketing strategy. digital marketing and social media more broadly.

1.- Example of blog content marketing

I introduce you Create And Go, a very successful blog (which I personally follow) that shares information related to blogging, marketing, and other related topics.

Create And Go regularly posts your blog content to keep readers interested and engaged. It includes a wide range of related topics for almost anyone who wants to start a blog or an online business.

All of the articles relate to the company's goal and mission to help entrepreneurs and bloggers succeed online and increase brand awareness. They do this by linking to your services and writing about clients who have already had positive experiences with the company.

2.- Example of video content marketing

Every day more and more people are using platforms such as YouTube to search for information about products and / or services. So don't overlook this.

You will now see an image of the YouTube channel de Tony Robbins:

Tony Robbins' channel has over a million subscribers. By promoting audiovisual content, you can show what you have to offer and generate leads on autopilot.

3.- Example of content marketing with paid advertising

Below you will see an image of a paid Facebook ad promoting Fiverr.com.

Fiverr is a Freelance page where you can get a Freelance for almost anything starting at $ 5, use paid and sponsored social media ads (like this one on Facebook) to reach your target audience when they browse your news channels.

Fiverr's content ads feature some of your products and / or services to attract target audience members to your site (and hopefully convert them into paying customers).

4.- Example of content marketing in social networks

Social media is always a great place to post and promote your content. Find out how Russell Brunson from ClickFunnels ClickFunnels (a digital platform for the creation of sales funnels) done: on Facebook via its FanPage:

Much of Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels' video content on social media has gone viral. Your marketing efforts are brand-driven, fun, and entertaining.

By making a name for itself through online video content, ClickFunnels has seen impressive growth and brand recognition. Social media marketing is another means by which Russell Brunson attracts customers to offer them the full range of products and services offered by ClickFunnels.

5.- Example of podcast content marketing

It's time to talk about podcast content marketing. A good example of effective use of this method is Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast:

Gary Vaynerchuk has a podcast dedicated to entrepreneurs, with very motivating and educational content. Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast complements the rest of his published content. You can subscribe to constantly receive its hundreds of podcasts or choose which ones you want to listen to.

Including a podcast in your marketing strategy is also a great way for you to connect with your target audience, improve brand awareness, and get follow-up from your audience members through a medium other than the typical one.

6.- Example of content marketing infographic

Another type of content that you can include in your marketing plan is infographics.

Take a look at the following image with a sample infographic Hotmart on the main email marketing statistics:

This Hotmart infographic is branded, well organized, and easy to read. Be clear about what the topic covers.

Content Marketing Plan

Here's a perfect video for newbies to content marketing that will give you some ideas for your content creation and strategy:

1.- Content Marketing Plan: Establish Smart Goals

The first part of your content marketing strategy is to define smart goals. They should be specific to your business; They are likely to complement your broader business and marketing goals.

Here are some examples of smart goals:

Improve brand awareness.
Boost your income.
Increase conversions.
Promote brand loyalty.
Increase customer engagement.
Build a good relationship and trust with customers.
Attract strategic partners.

2.- Content marketing plan: determine your key performance indicators

Then define key performance indicators (KPI) for your smart goals. KPIs are quantifiable data points that you can use to measure your actual performance against your goal.

Key performance indicators with smart goals

-Brand awareness Site traffic, followers on social networks, subscriptions, mentions (by customers and partners).

- Income Daily sales, site traffic.

-Conversions, conversion rate, cart abandonment rate, associated shipping rate trends, competitive price trends.

-Loyalty to the brand recurring customers, promoters, product reviews, references.

-Customer engagement Like, share, follow, mention, backlinks.

-Compenetration and trust of recurring customers, promoters, followers, mentions.

-Strategic partners New alliances, mentions, backlinks.

3.- Content marketing plan: decide on the type of content

Then choose the type of content you are going to create. To do this, start by thinking about your target audience and buyers.

Answer the following questions about your target audience to help you narrow down the types of content that are right for them:

What do they need from you?
What challenges are they trying to overcome?
Why do they need your product or service?
How can you help them be successful?
Where do they spend their time?

Then, study the different types of content that we looked at earlier to decide what types of content you are going to create.

4.- Content marketing plan: choose your content channels

Once you've decided what kind of content to market, it's time to choose your specific content channels. Where will you share your content? Where will it be fed and shared?

For some types of content, the chain you need to work with will be obvious. For example, if you create Facebook content, your channel will be the social platform itself.