Whether you love it or hate it, if you invest in marketing your business then you are investing in content marketing. Consider this:
No matter what tactics you use, content will inevitably be part of it. So, content marketing is not really something in addition to or separate from your marketing efforts, but part of it.
Your customers are already searching the web with questions that your business is uniquely positioned to answer. Addressing that with content marketing offers three key benefits. They are:
According to the Content Marketing Institute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Marketo has a similar definition:
“Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself.”
The terms “content marketing strategy,” “content strategy,” and “content marketing” are used interchangeably quite often.
Moz has created an illustration to help distinguish between these concepts.
To engage in content marketing, as with any other forms of marketing, you need a strategy and a plan of action. Also, your efforts must be monitored and measured to ensure you are on track with the overall strategy.
Your content strategy and content marketing strategy need to be aligned to your audience’s buying decisions and journey. The graphic below provides an overview of how content can be used to nurture your audience through the major stages of a buyer’s journey and some content types that could be created for each stage.
Producing industry-leading content that grows your business involves:
While you may be able to produce content, publish it, and promote it, a critical part of a sound content marketing strategy is ability to measure its effectiveness in the context of your business goals.
Getting started
If you are starting out with content marketing, keep the following in mind as you set up your analytics and look to acquire the metrics you need:
Key types of metrics to monitor on an ongoing basis include:
Consumption: These metrics look at the numbers primarily in your TOFU. They look at the number of visitors that consume your content, the frequency with which they do so, and channels they like best.
Retention: Retention-related metrics look at the effectiveness of holding your audience’s attention beyond the first contact.
Sharing: Sharing-related metrics provide insights into what content is being shared, by whom, and where, and what platforms or channels they use to share it.
Engagement: These metrics help gauge whether the content resonates with your audience, what action they take after consuming your content, if any, how frequently it happens, etc.
Leads: These metrics form part of your lead generation analysis. As your audience progresses through the buyer’s journey, some will come to a point in the middle of the journey where they become a lead. This is where you want to measure the number of new leads being generated and the consumption of content by existing leads.
Sales: Toward the end of the buyer’s journey, you’ll want to look at the dollar amount of opportunities influenced, generated, and won. Other metrics such as lifetime values of your customers also help paint a more detailed picture.
Production: These metrics have to do with content operations. It looks at how the team is performing against editorial calendar deadlines and goals. How long it takes to turn a content idea into a published piece of content. How many pieces you publish in a week or month.
Cost: Knowing your costs will help establish your ROI. You’ll need to track what it costs to produce and distribute each piece of content, including design fees, paid distribution costs, and related customer acquisition costs.