How-to Guide and Checklist for Content Marketing

Content marketing is an effective way to deliver your thoughts, opinions, and help people by giving solutions to their problems, saving other’s time and money as well. Companies use content marketing strategies to aware people about their brand, build strong relationships, boost sales, and generate leads.

People prefer content over traditional advertising as the content provides more valuable information. A quality content creation and its marketing go through a proper process called content marketing strategies. A marketer just needs to invest efforts and time to create valuable content and get an incredible outcome.

In this article, we will provide the answers to the how-to guide and checklist for content marketing,

How to Create Content by following Content Marketing strategies?

Many of the businesses don't properly adopt content marketing strategies and consider, as they are doing efforts but not getting the reward. Here, we will give a satisfying answer to how to build content marketing strategies.

1. Objective of Content

First and foremost, a content creator needs to identify their goal, which makes it easier to reach the targeted audience. For this purpose, your objective must be clear, such as what will be the content type, who will be your audience, how your content will value the readers, or when it will be published and through which platforms.

There are hidden aspects behind each goal, which are essential to achieve through content marketing strategies. Such as generating leads, driving the web traffic, brand awareness, customer relation etc. By considering these factors, the objective will automatically be clear.

1. Identification of the Targeted audience

To get the desired results, it’s necessary to reach the exact targeted audience. Firstly, identify the audience based on demographic such as age, education, gender and Income etc.

Collect demographic’s data from your social media viewers, visitors, subscribers, or followers. Facebook insight is a wonderful tool to provide the most relevant information of the audience. Also, do your site analysis and get emails from your targeted audience. Google Analytics is a perfect tool to know your audience interests as well. Similarly, Twitter analytics enable you to know your twitter followers or viewers interests.

Another way of identifying the audience is to get feedback from the current audience. What your audience gets from your content or how can you address their problems more effectively, etc. After getting feedback, understand your follower’s priorities to provide them with valuable content.

Audience identification proves beneficial when a person visits your content and gets their problem solution. You can write specific content for more than one type of audience.

1. Perform Content Audit and Determine the Type of Content

After knowing your audience, you need to identify which type of content your audience demands. First, conduct an audit of your previous data. The content audit enables you to determine a variety of things about your new content. You can review your last year’s blog posts and other contents and then get the conclusion, which of your content is more appreciated or attract an audience.

In digital media, you have a variety of options to create content such as blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts and infographics etc.

Or if you want to bring some change in content format, such as you have been writing blogs but now want to write an eBook, so you have to keep it relevant to blogs. After choosing your content type, it’s also important to keep the platform in mind as well. Beside your official site, also publish or share your content on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, etc.

1. Best Channels for Publishing your Content

Your online presence will be the best tool to know which platform gives you the flow of the audience. Evaluate your site and social media groups to know which platform will prove useful for your content. For this, you can use online free analytic tools. One of the best tools is Google Analytics which provides you with deep information about your content as you can check how many people shared your previous content and that of content is most shared.

1. Create Content

After research on the audience and content type, start creating content. For example, you are going to write a blog and you have decided the topic as well. Strat research on the topic by searching the most popular relevant blogs. Find out how your content will value your audience.

Your content not only reflects your brand but also is very casual and understandable. Maintain the balance between your brand and audience preferences.

1. Content Optimization

Keywords play a vital role in content optimization. A visitor lands on your content through keywords. You need to enhance your content marketing by correctly using keywords. It puts an effective impact not only on your brand reputation, but your site also gets ranked in google searches.

Or if your content contains videos/ images, so your title and heading, description and conclusion must be fully optimized. Besides that, Alt text, images sizes, video sizes, and meta tags also support your site SEO.

1. Manage the Creation and Publication of your Content

In case, you have multiple contents to publish, make a proper schedule of publishing. Consider some important things, before publishing the content.

Which content will be published first? (based on customer preference)

Where your content will be published?

When you will publish the content?

Take help of smart scheduling tools to manage workflows such as Google Calendar, CoSchedule and HubSpot. List down all content topics in the calendar with their publishing dates and sites as well. Manage the content in the way, on which platform your audience will give attention to which of your content. Also get to know, which time most of your targeted audience is online. In this way, your effort will not be wasted.

Checklist for Content Marketing

Checklist for content marketing empowers you to keep the essential things in consideration, besides only focusing on content creation. Let’s have a look at the important checklist point in content creation.

• Keyword Research

As you know the worth of keyword of content, so create a spreadsheet where you will organize your keyword data.

You can use keyword analysis tools such as Google keyword planner, SEMRush or Moz etc. You can filter out top keywords having a high volume. Make your selected keywords support your content fully. You can also use long-tail keywords or single keywords, which are more closed to your content.

• Measure your Content

Giving the content a creative look is not enough, you need to regularly evaluate your content performance. You may have done a lot of research to provide the right content to the right audience, but sometimes it doesn’t work. May your audience want something new or innovative.

You need to measure your content-driven readers to increase your sales or generate leads or not. In this way, you can timely modify or remove poor-performing content as well.

• Tips for Content Distribution

Simply publishing the content will not be effective, you need to adopt some promotional tips as well. Apply the repeatable process in a content promotion like to share your content in maximum groups, pages, comment sections and create backlinks as well. Ask your regular audience to share your content maximum. In such a way, your content will reach to a new audience as well as to those who want such type of content but fail.

• Landing Page

When a viewer lands on your page by following the link, your content must be so effective that the viewer read it fully with interest. For this, you need to focus on the above things.

Write clear and concise lines with a link, which will help the reader know about the content type.

Create a strong topic heading which shows some excitement or value to the reader. After that, your landing page design, graphics, writing style, font sizes, and colours also add to your content.

• Content Proofreading

Your content objective must include purity, like your content must be unique and original. It should be free of plagiarism and grammatical mistakes, which put a bad impact on the reader.

Also, make sure your content is comprehensive and clear. If there is an important message or information you have missed, proofreading help to correct it before publishing.

Your content must meet the standards. Like if you are writing any academic content or research work, it must follow APA or such other formats.

Most importantly, if you are discussing or challenging anything, your information must be authentic. Unsure information can lead your content into trouble or in serious circumstances it will affect your business reputation as well.

Conclusion

In this article, you may have got the idea of how you can engage your audience and boost sales by applying the best content marketing strategies on your content. Content has the power to attract people, it depends on the content creator how much he/she puts efforts.

Danya Ayaz is specialize digital Marketer & lead gen specialist at Digital Gravity She is obsessed with Marketing and experimenting new things in life.