What is Content Marketing?
Author Rothman (2015) states “content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant content to attract, acquire, and engage your audience” to help with advertising a business or product (para. 1).
Content marketing is used as a channel because we can make a meaningful and measurable impact on business through multiple channels, such as social media accounts. Content marketing has seven elements: engaging with individuals on their own terms, have interactions with buyers, make sure it tells a story, has the right fit for each channel, has a clear purpose, make sure it has end goals in mind, and finally make sure the content has a theme (Rothman, 2015).
For the end product make sure you can fit content marketing into seven of these elements. Content marketing is the act of owning as opposed to renting media. The business won’t need to waste money on renting peoples’ attention. For example, when you are at a tradeshow you are renting a space to sell your business, whereas content marketing is creating their thoughts and leadership. Thought leadership is educational information and sales content marketing sells your product (Rothman, 2015).
Creating a Foundation for Content Marketing
An important critical part of content marketing is to make sure you hire the right team. A managing editor works closely with the content strategy and editorial calendar as well as being in charge of most of the operations. You should also look into hiring an Associate Editor to coordinate projects. An external team is also important to help with the brand voice (Rothman, 2015).
To make sure the marketing strategy works having a structure to follow will help a great deal. This is usually done up by the Managing Editor and Associate Editor to ensure proper procedures and guidelines are followed. For any business to be relative and effective you must create personal relationships with buyers which then, in turn, will have their buying journey (Rothman, 2015).
Next, you need to create your brand voice, the content marketing will make you sound either nice, too direct, professional, even like a robot.
Creating a Plan
When creating your plan, you can start brainstorming for new ideas. Once there is a plan created and you have some good solid brainstorming ideas the next step is to map the content into a sales funnel. It includes different stages of what needs the customers have.
Following the sales funnel Rothman (2015) suggests “to choose the content goals, proposed channels, the brand look and feel and the different topics that are chosen” once this step is accomplished it begins to form what the content will look like (para. 7).
Finally, in the planning stage creating the editorial calendar will help with providing visibility for the organization to follow so employees know where the organization is heading.
Creating the Content
With the planning stage completed now is the time to start creating the content. The first step is to determine who in the organization knows about the topic, which can include a session called a “brain dump”. The next step is to create an outline to keep things organized and step three is to create the first draft that should include a thesis of content marketing. Step four is to review and proofread and step five write another draft and include all documentation with the first and second draft to ensure all thoughts are included (Rothman, 2015).
Once everything is written up its time to start the designing process. This takes time and effort this stage is the most critical because it is whether the design will attract customers to your product or business. Content curation is an option for different ideas and collaborating. Doing more with less will help the organization utilize the resources in a more important stage. Following the steps will help formalize the content in action: create a ‘big rock’ content asset, create eBooks, cheat sheets, visuals, and blog posts to help get the marketing started (Rothman, 2015).
Promoting the Content
Before you promote the content Rothman (2015) suggests that “you outline the promotional strategy” because it helps with promoting your team (para. 1). As well as adding promotional items to your company website will enhance sales.
Promoting through social media, email and blogs will help you gain different types of customers to develop the persona between each other. Today’s society has people filling prescriptions online as well as getting groceries delivered to your home, so it is critical to promote your business online everywhere.
Syndicating your content and influencer marketing are unique ways to promote content. Make those connections by networking at several different events. You are creating a valuable two-way relationship (Rothman, 2015).
Finally, for ways to promote your product you can use the pay-per-click ads on different websites, your ads should be attractive to the eye, maybe a banner with music or flashing lights (Rothman, 2015).
Measuring the Content
Creating a measurement can track metrics over time to see exactly how content marketing is performing (Rothman, 2015). After measurement goals, the early content creates awareness and educational information. You can track how often your content is being shared or how often there are comments. To track the revenue within the business the mid and late-stage content is later in the sales funnel. It proves whether the revenue and investment in your business are worth the time and effort (Rothman, 2015).
Conclusion
In conclusion content marketing is advertising the content. If developed and promoted correctly it could bring in a great deal of success and revenue into the business or organization. For the organization I work for they use the line “What the health is going on??” they have this line on all their promotional items because they promote health, it is a health organization (Bigstone Health Commission, 2018).
References
About us. (2018). Bigstone Health Commission. Retrieved from https://www.bigstonehealth.ca/about-us/
Rothman, D. (2015, May 7). Content marketing foundations. Lynda.com. Retreived from https://www.lynda.com/Marketing-Lead-Generation-tutorials/Content-Marketing-Fundamentals-2015/369044-2.html
Shannons Blog 