What is content marketing?
First things first, content marketing refers to the creation of any online assets that are designed to help you meet your digital marketing objectives. This could be anything from a blog post, video or image, to an email or podcast. As long as it’s creative, valuable and intended to bring you closer your target audience – then it’s part of your content marketing strategy.
Content really is key to a high-performing site, app or online business. Having the right content is a way of driving the most valuable users to your product or service. That is why it’s so important to have a solid content marketing plan in place.
What are the benefits of content marketing?
So, we already know that content marketing can help build more trust between you and your target customers. But, how does it really work? . We’ve outlined the specific benefits it can bring to your business below:
- Backlinks and site traffic – The more shareable content you produce, the more traffic you will drive back to your website. You can target your customer profile and attract users who are likely to convert.
- Credibility and authority – Producing relatable content can help establish you as an authoritative and knowledgeable voice in your industry.
- Improved SEO and online visibility – Content can be creative and cover various topics that users will search. By improving your content marketing, you will better your SEO.
- Cost-effectiveness – It can be a cheaper alternative and attract new audiences who may be less interested in traditional advertising channels.
- Stronger relationships – Keeping an audience in the loop with valuable and informative content can be a way of encouraging users to revisit your site.
- Growing your social media following – Your content marketing plan can help your business stay relevant as a result of following trending topics and conversations.
What is a content marketing road map?
A content marketing road map is a way of capturing and communicating your digital marketing plans visually. It is essentially a way of keeping track of your content campaigns and ensuring they are working together – rather than competing against each other. Think of a road map as a firm plan which ties your ideas together. It’s the last part of your strategy building process.
We create content road maps to make sure we know what we will post, when we will post it and how things change at different stages of the marketing funnel. It’s essentially a way of keeping organised within your team – which will improve your results Your road map should help you to do the following:
- Help you to generate leads.
- Establish content ownership (i.e. who is doing what?)
- Identify the personas of your customers or target customers.
- Work out the type of content that your customers prefer (visual, written, interactive etc).
- Identify any achievable digital marketing goals.
- Reach customers at different stages of the marketing funnel.
- Create content within your unique digital marketing budget.
- Use road map milestones to highlight key dates and initiatives.
Creating your content marketing road map
It’s important to remember that the road map is not a place to list every single piece of content you create and publish. It is a place to map your key content projects across each stage of the marketing funnel.
So, you should be using a road map to clarify things like priorities and deadlines for the content creators and publishers in your team. Also, it’s a place to clarify the values and objectives behind your content. Before finalising a road map – you’ll need to be confident in your plan. We’ve listed a few of the most important steps to cover before finalising your road map:
Clarify your content marketing budget
While this agreeably isn’t the most exciting part of any digital marketing campaign – it is important. Different content needs require different budgets. Your budget should consider the need for keeping your unique target audience fully engaged throughout a campaign.
For example, if as a business, you want to communicate with your customers through things like video or e-books – you will need to have a flexible budget that allows you do to so.
Also, think about how often you will be producing content. If you want to communicate with customers daily – you’ll need to consider how to keep things interesting and engaging. This might mean a more flexible budget to use a variety of content formats.
Establish a workflow
Who will be doing what when it comes to your content marketing? When it comes to content – it is likely you’ll need more than one expertise. For example, will you need somebody to manage the social media? A blogger? Or perhaps a videographer? There is more to content than just writing – so it is best to work out ‘who is doing what’ before diving into a campaign.
You might want to appoint somebody to check over content before it is published. For example, this could be a team member who can give advice from an SEO perspective.
Find the right content tools
It’s not just about the people behind your content – but also the tools. You can use your road map to establish which tools will be used, and when. We’ve outlined a few of our favourite content marketing tools to get you started:
- CoSchedule – CoSchedule is an agile marketing platform that is used to organise all of your digital marketing in one, clear place. The main features of this platform include being able to organise and track pieces of content on your calendar and managing small and large campaigns in one clear place.
- Grammarly – Even with years of writing experience under your belt, you may still benefit from gaining a second opinion, before publishing a piece of content. Grammarly is a helpful writing tool that can detect everything from grammar and spelling, to punctuation, sentence types and word variation. We recommend submitting articles, blogs and even social media posts into Grammarly before publishing them – especially if you’re just getting started in the world of content marketing.
- WordPress – WordPress is a popular CMS (content management system) and is a powerful tool for anybody who wants to get high-quality content in front of their target audience. As a digital marketing agency, we use WordPress to share our content – including blogs and webpages.
You can find out more about our favourite content tools here.
Decide what type of content to post
Once you’ve established your roles as a team and the right tools for your objectives – you can start to create the content. Now, this is where you need to consider what type of content is going to work to your advantage. The answer will depend on things like your target audience, budget, your industry and your digital marketing goals. We’ve listed a few ideas:
- Blogs
- Case Studies
- White Papers
- Ebooks
- Podcast
- Infographics
- Video
Plan your content distribution
When distributing your content – you need to figure out where your target audience are going to find it. For example, are they on Twitter? Facebook? Google? or perhaps you want to focus on your on-site content. After all, there isn’t much point in creating high-quality content if nobody is going to see it!
Get in Touch
We’ve highlighted the key aspects of a solid content marketing plan. Hopefully, once you’ve considered these things – you will be able to create a clear and helpful road map.
We suggest referring to your road map throughout a campaign. If you have any questions or want to find out more about our content marketing services – just contact us.