7 Most Important Components Of A Winning Content Marketing Process

The modern customer is well educated and has many options to choose from. So, a few tempting advertisements are no longer enough to persuade them. In fact, 43% of PPC marketers say display ads are their least effective channel. That means you cannot count on ads alone to get sales! 

You must also go for continued efforts to build and maintain your brand image and engagement with your target audience. And that’s where content marketing enters!

Content marketing involves using written, audio, or video content to engage with your target audience and convince them to buy your product or service. It is a highly effective strategy used by around 82% of established businesses to attract qualified leads.

However, content marketing is not one activity. It has multiple components that you must plan and execute flawlessly to make your mark and get conversions. So, this blog will explain content marketing and its seven components to help you build an unbeatable content marketing campaign from the ground up. Let’s begin!

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing involves creating and publishing relevant and targeted content for specific online audiences. It is a popular content marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain the target audience by creating and sharing articles, videos, podcasts, and other relevant media. 

If applied correctly, content marketing establishes your expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business at the top of your prospective buyer’s mind. Here’s why content marketing is important:

• Boosts conversions by effectively convincing prospects.
• Creates a sense of authority and community approval around your brand.
• Educates your prospective customers about the products and services you offer.
• Shows your audience how your offerings can solve their challenges or meet their needs.
• Builds engagement and directs relationships with your customers to ensure better conversions and loyalty.

What Is A Content Marketing Process?

After knowing what the benefits of content marketing are, let’s look at the process.

The content marketing process involves planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing your content via the appropriate channels to reach and convince your target audience to buy your offerings. The content may be in written, multimedia, or audio format. And the channel may include social media, blogs, websites, podcasts, press releases, apps, print publications, webinars, etc. 

The goal of the content marketing process is to reach your target audience and increase brand awareness, engagement, sales, and loyalty. Here are the critical components of this process-

1. Content Planning and Strategy

This is the first stage of content marketing, where you conduct market research and formulate your content plan and strategy. It includes a study of the customers and other market conditions to determine the types of content you will create, who will create it, which channels you will use for publication, how frequently you publish, and so on.

This is where you must figure out these key factors to chalk out a basic plan of what you would create and when you will publish it-

• Aim: What are the primary objectives of your content? Do you want to increase sales, increase brand recognition, or improve your SEO?
• Target audience: Who you are talking to.
• Journey mapping: What you are trying to get your audience to do at every stage of the sales funnel.
• Channel and format selection: Where and how you are reaching the audience (Check out types of content marketing formats in detail.)
• Topic selection: What you are talking to them about at every stage.
• Scheduling: Build a content calendar to decide when and what you will publish based on the anticipated events or trends.
• Optimization: How you can optimize your content to maximize your results.
• Evaluation and maintenance: On what basis will you evaluate the performance of your content, and how will you maintain its effectiveness?
• Project management and budgeting: How will your team implement the plan, and how many resources will you allocate for it?

Remember to keep your content strategy specific to your company’s aims, human resources, and available budget. Moreover, you must revisit and update your content marketing strategy once or twice a year.

2. Content Ideation and Creation

Once you have defined the content’s aims and theme and developed a good strategy, you may start brainstorming and researching to find content ideas. This stage of the process involves searching for keywords and search terms relevant to your niche and the available opportunities for new content. Using the results of this stage, you must now decide on the best topics for your marketing content.

Next, you must create content based on what you planned in the previous stage. The content creation process involves these steps-

• Find relevant keywords and understand the funnel stage and intent of the readers before you start creating the planned content. Also learn about the Content Marketing Funnel.
• Research your topic, outline the structure with critical points, and prepare for writing. Create unique, relevant, and helpful content in line with your content marketing strategy and the search intent of the target audience. 
• Add a clear call to action and lead generation form where appropriate to ensure that impressed viewers can immediately move towards the purchase.

Also, remember to tackle your content projects in small steps instead of trying to do everything at once.

3. Content Optimization

Content optimization involves ensuring that the content is written in a way that it can reach and impress the largest possible target audience. It involves optimizing content for search engines and lead generation.

You must ensure that associated keywords and lead generation methods are present, add meta and title tags, and include relevant links, among other improvement tricks. Here are the key optimization tips and techniques you must apply-

a) Write great content 

You must design your content to inform or entertain your audience in a relatable manner. It must address the relevant concerns or needs of the audience while subtly introducing your product, your services, or your business as the ideal solution.

b) Keep new content coming

Publishing new content regularly keeps your audience excited and engaged while improving your search result page rankings, as search engines prefer fresh content.

c) Use headings and pointwise structuring

Using headings in the content and a point-wise structure where applicable will boost the readability of your content for both human readers and search engines. This trick can make all the difference in your content’s visibility and your audience’s retention.

d) Optimize the text for search engines

Apply SEO measures, including keywords, title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URL optimization.

e) Optimize images 

Optimize the images on your website by using alt tags and ensuring the right file size and dimensions. This will ensure better rankings and quicker loading of your website.

f) Optimize videos 

Optimize the videos with relevant keywords in your title, descriptions, and tags. Also, share videos on social media sites and include a CTA to maximize viewership and conversions.

g) Focus on the readers

Write content that is natural and useful for your target audience instead of focusing solely on optimization for search engines. Your content should address the search intent of readers while using a human and personalized approach that they can relate to.

h) Use social media 

Share your content on social media to bring it to its full potential! Sharing on social platforms will build engagement and lasting relationships and offer viewers’ feedback. And this will help you get quick results and crucial input from the target audience.

i) Keep it Clean

A search engine may not index anything that it finds hard to understand. So, make sure you keep your code clean and organized. Moreover, you should use HTML layouts, CSS layouts, and sitemaps while avoiding plagiarized and illegal content.

4. Content Publishing

Once you have planned, created, and optimized your content, it’s time to publish it! Use the content marketing plan and content calendar to guide the publishing process and use automation tools if required. You may post various types of content, such as images, blogs, and videos, on diverse platforms like blog sites, social media, video sharing platforms, and landing pages based on your plan.

However, you cannot just publish content on one platform and expect people to discover and engage with it! You must promote your content to ensure the desired visibility and reach through distribution channels. And you can do this using both paid and organic channels that you own, you pay for, or you earn (where people themselves share your content).

The primary distribution techniques you must apply are-

• Sharing the content on forums, blog sites, and social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc., with the link to its source.
• Sharing the content through your channel on video-sharing platforms.
• Emailing the content to your list of subscribers and customers as newsletters or promotional emails. 
• Using paid advertisements to bring people to your landing page content, blog site, videos, etc.
• Sending it to influencers or popular content creators in your niche and collaborating with them to have them promote your content.
• Requesting people to share your content if they like it.

5. Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is another effective way to get more eyes on your content by improving or updating it and bringing it to people on other platforms. You can use it to promote and reuse older content instead of spending more resources on making new content. The popular content repurposing methods include:

• Reformatting content from one medium to another, like text format to video or graphics.
• Breaking up long-form content into smaller, easily understandable parts.
• Combining shorter pieces of content to create comprehensive content where needed.
• Republishing or syndicating the content to other channels in the same format.

Whatever option you prefer will go a long way in maximizing the results of the efforts and resources you spend on creating the original content. But the question is- How do you recognize what content needs repurposing?

Here are a few tested ways to find content that is fit for repurposing-

• Google Analytics

Look at the “landing pages” report in Google Analytics to find the pages (and your content in them) that bring in the most traffic. This report would show you which content is popular with your audience. And you can further improve such content and share it on more platforms, possibly in new formats, to bring even better results.

• YouTube Analytics

This is another approach to find what’s working but is applied to see which YouTube videos are doing well using the YouTube Studio. You can re-upload these successful videos with enhancements, share them through influencers for further popularity, or turn them into podcast episodes or blog posts to enhance their reach.

• Post-By-Post analysis

Go through your blog feed and jot down any posts that are still relevant currently. You can now update these blogs or turn them into new formats, such as podcasts or videos, for reuse.

6. Content Evaluation

Evaluating the performance of your content is an essential part of all content marketing processes. And evaluating the success of your content can help you identify successful techniques you can apply to future content.

At the same time, this indicates the unsuccessful aspects so that you can alter your content strategy to eliminate the errors in it. Here are the key performance indicators you should apply for evaluating your content-

• Web Traffic by Source/Medium

Use the Channel report in Google Analytics to see where your blog traffic is coming from and how the source is changing. Are users getting to your content organically? Or are they being referred from other sites or ads?

• User Behavior 

When coupled with other metrics, such as traffic or conversion, user behavior metrics can provide you with actionable insights into reader engagement and content performance.

• Here are the major behavioral metrics in Google Analytics
  • Time on Page
  • Bounce Rate
  • Pages/Session
  • New/Returning Visitors

For example, you can determine if a blog post matches searchers’ intent based on the fact that it brings users organically and spends a lot of time on the page to read it.

• Impressions & CTR

You should also track impressions and click-through rates in Google Search Console. It will help you know if your content and optimization efforts translate to more impressions (number of times the content is made visible to users) and a higher click-through rate (percentage of total viewers who click on the CTA link) in organic search.

• Content Shares & Backlinks

Shares and backlinks indicate whether or not people are willing to share your content with their audiences. They show how well your content resonates with target audiences and raises your reach exponentially.

• Keyword Rankings 

Keep track of your core keywords and review rankings using the right tools monthly. Keyword ranking improvements indicate that your content is performing well compared to competitors.

7. Content maintenance

This includes ensuring your content is relevant, accurate, and updated. Its ultimate purpose is to help you grow engagement with your audiences sustainably. And it does this by keeping your content fresh, optimized, and aligned with your current business goals.

Here are some essential steps involved in content maintenance-

• Ensure content quality

You must keep your content accurate and up-to-date by checking it regularly in light of recent developments. You must also set achievable standards and aim to achieve them to ensure the quality of content.

• Ensure compatibility and mobile optimization

Make sure that your content is compatible with all popular browsers and appears appropriately on all mobile devices. Mobile optimization is crucial as mobile devices are growing quickly in popularity, and you would miss out on a large audience if your content is not mobile optimized.

• Update and improve your CTAs (Call To Action)

You must update the call to action in your text, audio, or video content to ensure that it is attractive, compelling, and in line with the latest trends. Remember to verify and update the CTA frequently as it influences conversions directly.

• Audit and improve your content

You must also audit your content regularly using a planned process based on KPIs such as lead generation, click-through rate, keywords rankings, impressions, etc. This will help you find errors or shortcomings in your content and make required corrections.

• Consider user feedback during your maintenance tasks

All the above tasks must take the audience’s feedback into account. After all, they are who you are trying to convince. So their opinion is undeniably the most important.

Start Building Your Content Marketing Process!

An efficient content marketing process will help you reach your target audience and convert them into loyal customers at low costs. So, you must focus on implementing the 7 stages of the content marketing process in the most cost-effective way using the steps and techniques discussed in this blog.

Moreover, always ensure that your plan is based on thorough research and remember to update it regularly, or you may spend a lot of time and resources with compromised results! Also, you should set quality standards for each implementation step and measure your success based on the right key performance indicators to find and correct deviations from your plan.

Eventually, creating and distributing high-quality content based on a strategic plan will boost your engagement and conversions, bringing higher sales for your business.

All the best!

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