Content Marketing: create relevant content for your audience

Do you find it difficult to connect with your audience? Do you fail to generate conversation with your target audience? Do you not know if your content is useful for your users? Do you know if you are really generating interest in your product or service?

Well, all this is possible thanks to a Content Marketing strategy. If you want to work effectively on your marketing strategy, it is essential that you have a good content marketing strategy behind you.

What is Content Marketing?

According to Joe Pulizzi, one of the fathers of content marketing, it is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a well-defined audience with the goal of converting them into future customers”.

In other words, Content Marketing is a long-term strategy, where the objective is to create a strong relationship with your customer, offering them quality content in different formats to arouse their interest and attract them to us as well as to create loyalty to your brand.

What are the benefits of Content Marketing?

Content Marketing, as we have said, is a long-term strategy that involves time and resources. So, why do we advise you to use it? Here are some of its advantages:

• Generates Brand Awareness and Engagement: publishing interesting, relevant and quality content for your audience increases the number of people who know your brand and your products and/or services. It also creates a greater positive perception of the brand, greater user trust and many more interactions.
• Become a reference: being present whenever someone searches for information about you or about your areas of conversation will make you gain authority and become a reference in your sector.
• Improve your web positioning: publishing content constantly, regularly and related to your product or service will increase the traffic to your website and place you in the top search positions.
• Acquire new customers and increase your sales: a correct content marketing strategy will make potential users get to know you, enter your website and, therefore, value buying your product or service. 

How to create a correct Content Marketing strategy?

In order to implement a content strategy, it is essential to be clear about 4 aspects:

1. Define your buyer persona

   And you may ask yourself, what is that? Well, it is simply a fictitious representation of your ideal client or your target audience. Why? To know as much as possible about them, to be able to offer them a personalised service, with relevant content and useful sales information. See [here] the full article where we explained what a buyer persona is and the step-by-step guide on how to create one.

2. Choosing the territories of conversation

   Why does Redbull decide to partner with Formula 1 and sponsor a team? Why does Rolex sponsor the TED Talks? Or why does Banco Santander sponsor the Spanish Football League? It is important to define the territories that we are interested in associating with our brand and with which we will talk to our buyer persona, but… how do we define them? What process do we follow? At Cronuts.Digital we use the content onion, a simple tool that will help us to define the topics by filling in from the centre of the onion outwards:

   • Brand: at the centre of our strategy we will place our brand.
   • Products: list our product portfolio.
   • Benefits: detail the benefits that our brand responds to. We will differentiate between functional benefits and emotional benefits.
   • Territories: list of topics of conversation we can have with our buyer persona related to these benefits.
   • Download template

3. Identifying the Funnel or conversion funnel

   It is important to be clear about the different steps that a user has to take to achieve a certain goal (whether it is the purchase of a product or service, a registration or the generation of a lead). In a following post we will go into more detail in each of the different phases of the funnel, but it is important to have them clear before launching our content strategy:

   • Capture or awareness: in the upper funnel or top of the funnel we want our target audience to get to know us by offering them content that is of interest to them and provides value.
   • Consideration or interaction: that the traffic that arrives, for example, to our website performs the desired action and becomes a lead.
   • Conversion: getting the lead to convert (e.g. become a sale).
   • Loyalty or retention: finally, we will try to get these customers, whether current or potential, to repeat and/or make them aware of our products or services.

4. Selecting distribution channels and formats

Finally, to get our traffic through all the stages of the funnel mentioned above, we must use different types of content depending on the channel, the format and the stage of the funnel in which we find ourselves.

First, however, we must have selected the conversation territories of our content onion that arouse the interest of our target audience (buyer persona).

We recommend that you do not focus solely on a single format or channel, such as social networks or your website, but diversify to reach a wider audience.

Here are some examples:

• • Blog: undoubtedly one of the best tools to be relevant and keep your audience connected.
  • Newsletters: when a user subscribes to our newsletter, they do so knowing that they are going to receive information from the brand. Therefore, we must make good use of this tool by offering them content that really adds value, to prevent them from unsubscribing.
  • Videos: video is one of the key trends of recent years and it is growing all the time. This is demonstrated by the fact that more than 80% of brands are already using video as part of their marketing strategies. It is a perfect tool with a huge potential to connect with users in a fast, direct and emotional way.
  • Downloadable formats (for example, guides, ebooks…): a perfect ally to offer our clients quality content that helps us to achieve this and turn them into promoters of our brand.
  • Infographics: a well-designed infographic is an excellent way to transmit content quickly, attractively and simply.
  • Podcasts: one of the trends that is here to stay. This type of content is currently widely used as a channel for disseminating news, but also for attracting new audiences and building loyalty among existing ones. Almost 50% of internet users admit to listening to podcasts, 80% of whom do so from their mobile devices.
  • Slideshows, video tutorials, webinars…: these are some of the other different formats we can use to reach our buyer persona.

How can we measure the results of our Content Marketing strategy?

To know if our content is achieving our objectives, it is essential to measure its performance and the effectiveness of our efforts. There are different indicators depending on the format and strategy, but here are some of the main KPIs that we should take into account:

• Page views or comments

  In the case of blogs, this indicator allows us to know the number of visits received on our article. Likewise, comments (positive and negative) are also a good indicator to obtain additional information about our brand. Therefore, we recommend reading them and classifying them into categories that are useful for the brand.

• Engagement of the publication

  In the case of publications on social networks, the main indicator to take into account is the engagement rate, measured by the total number of interactions (number of likes, comments…) that this publication has generated, divided by the number of followers of the network, multiplied by 100. The more interaction your followers have with your content, the more relevant it is.

• Open rate, click-through rate or conversion rate

  There are several metrics to measure the performance of your email marketing. One of them, and the best known, is the Open Rate, which simply tells us how many users that we have sent the email to have opened it. Another interesting indicator is the Click Through Rate (CTR), which indicates how many of the total number of emails have been clicked on a specific link or button. In case of email marketing campaigns, we will look at the conversion rate, i.e. the percentage of recipients who have clicked on the email and have completed the objective of the campaign (product purchase, fill out a form …).

• Cost per Lead and ROI

These two metrics will let us know if we are on the right track and if we have chosen the right strategy, as they allow us to calculate how much it costs to get the data of a customer and the return on our investment.

To analyse the metrics, we recommend that you use a comparative table so that you can get clues about which content is working best and is engaging the audience the most. Once you have created this first analysis, you should monitor the dates to get a more accurate picture of when your content is performing best.

Content Marketing Trends for 2021

2021 will bring a number of changes in content marketing. Here is a summary of some of the most significant trends that will change the current landscape and that you should be aware of:

• Visual content

  Due to the excess of content being generated for users and the decrease in their attention span, it highlights the need to use images to tell provocative stories that capture the reader’s attention.

• Interactive content

  This includes augmented reality and virtual reality with much more interactive content.

• Voice technology

  The use of voice is gaining more and more space and notoriety in the technological world. There is already talk that the search engines of the future will be voice search. Proof of this is that the way people search for information online has changed significantly in recent years and, increasingly, users are using voice search on their smartphones, tablets and voice assistants to find what they are exploring on the Internet. In addition, it is important to know that it impacts the SEO of our website.

• Artificial Intelligence

  The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) not only in chatbot sque we have seen so far (which are expected to be much more effective in providing better customer service) but also the use of AI used in data collection as well as content distribution and campaigns.