Guidelines for Content Marketing(2020)

Like many other professionals, you aim to acquire traffic and optimize your conversions through content marketing. Like them, you want to create quality content that will grab your target audiences' attention and fill your backlog. And for a good reason: in B2B as in B2C, content marketing has proven itself; marketers around the world have massively adopted it. Therefore, it is logical to want to take advantage of it to get ahead of your competitors and gain market share.

But where to start? What content to create? To submit them to whom? And for what purpose? If all of these questions are still spinning in your head, you need a helping hand when you get started.

 It's a whole process of identifying needs, creating, promoting, and measuring performance that awaits you on the road to success. This is why we welcome you to find some main steps to follow to set up and deploy your strategy under optimal conditions for the content.

Objectives of your content marketing strategy

• There is no route without a destination and no content strategy without goals to achieve. The nature of these objectives depends on your field of activity, your company's characteristics, and your market, your target audiences, the products/services you offer. Here are some essential points.
• Demonstrate your expertise?
• Gain visibility on the web?
• Acquire traffic?
• Increase your volume of page views?
• Generate leads?
• Boost your sales?
• Optimize the engagement of your audiences?

Your content strategy cannot target all the objectives, but it can be organized around an itinerary punctuated by specific purposes, including cross-channel. For example:

1. Acquire traffic.
2. Generate leads.
3. Boost sales Or: develop your notoriety.
4. Gain qualified traffic.
5. Send visitors to physical stores so that they can buy them.

These objectives can also be quantified: increase the number of unique visitors to your website by 28%, double the number of shares of blog articles on social media, etc. The bottom line is that your content marketing goals be concrete and shared by the entire company.

To know your target audiences to deploy a content strategy. 

For 28% of content marketers, the biggest challenge is creating content that appeals to the target audience (the return on investment only comes in second, with 22%. in fact, the basis of your entire content strategy: you must identify indeed the audiences you want to reach to produce good content. As such, several questions arise:

• Who are your products/services? What needs do they meet? 
• Who are your typical customers? What are their characteristics?
• On which media channel can your customers be reached? 
• What information are they looking for?
• How long is the customer journey in your industry?

The answers allow you to create personas - robotic portraits of your typical clients, those you will think of when preparing your editorial line. A classic persona is a patchwork of several data: sex, age, personal situation, socio-professional category, geographical area, areas of interest, issues obstacles to purchasing, media used. In B2B, we will also talk about company size, the position held, motivations, current suppliers or customers, etc.

The act of identifying your target allows you to set up a strategy for useful and relevant content based on real needs. It also helps to humanize your targets to understand the issues your buyers face.

Identify the themes and subjects likely to interest your target audiences

There are two scenarios for this step: either you are new to content marketing or already in this marketing.

You are just starting. Start by defining your column field, namely the themes that have your audiences' limits not crossed. For example, a real estate agency that offers residential properties will exclude anything relating to professional real estate. Still, it will deal with the sale, purchase, rental management, investment, taxation, etc.

Half a dozen priority themes are already a good start. You will be able to draw several hundred subjects from it. Please note: all must have a link with your activity. It's a matter of consistency with your audiences and relevance to search engines, which will have to decide whether your pages deserve to be displayed in the results.

You must identify the subjects on which you will be working and regularly seek new ideas.

• interview influencers and opinion leaders,
• analyze trends on search engines (Google Trends),

• measure the performance of your publications (on your blog, on social networks) to find out which subjects have been popular with your audiences,
• compile a list of questions asked by your target audiences (forums, groups on social networks, etc.),

Make a list of keywords to address

Keywords are the essence of your content strategy They signify the web links that join you to Internet users. You can't read their minds, but by knowing what search engines are typing and how they phrase it, you can find out a lot about what they want.

These keywords are essential on two levels:

• To understand the research of your target audiences and be able to respond to them with relevance. If you sell shoes, you will be interested to know that consumers mostly type "new shoes," used shoes," or "sports shoes." It also gives you ideas for topics to cover.
• To optimize the positioning of your pages in search engine results. Keywords are like beacons intended to communicate with engine robots: through them, you indicate that this content can meet such needs expressed by Internet users. For example, by writing content on "expert running shoes," you will be able to display your page in the answers given to Internet users who have typed this request (in fact, it is a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea).

To find them out, you can type in sets of keywords on Google and look at the number of results displayed. 

Measure your performance to optimize your content strategy

We have come to the end of this journey in the land of content marketing. Your content strategy is in place. Your content is efficiently distributed on carefully chosen media. It remains for you to take stock of your efforts to assess the success of your content marketing. Do the results meet your expectations? Is your strategy giving the expected return on investment?

A content strategy is not a long quiet river, far from it. A better analogy would be to evoke a hostile territory where everything is to be discovered. Therefore, it is essential to take the time to prepare yourself well and bring together all the elements that will allow you to deploy relevant, useful, and rewarding content marketing for your business.

Also read 9 Types of Digital Marketing You Should be Familiar With

By Elice Gray