Content Marketing: How to create a great content

Content marketing is not as easy as some would think. Once you launch your corporate blog and start publishing content, you will understand the difficulties.

No matter how well crafted or creative your content there is a lot more that needs to be done for effective content marketing. For successful content marketing – remember the simple maxim ‘Plan your Work; Work your Plan’

To be effective in the long term, content marketing needs a pragmatic marketing strategy rather than just a list of tricks and techniques.

While crafting content, bear in mind your different target audiences. Successful content marketing obviously needs content that is relevant and appealing to your audience. While creating content ask yourself –

• What content will my prospects like most?
• What social media channel my prospects use?
• Is my content thought-provoking enough?

Be clear in your mind about content marketing goals.  The content marketing goals may vary –

• Creating brand awareness
• Attain better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings
• Generating sales leads
• Increasing engagement

Identify resources such as software, tools, employees, money etc.

Create thoughtful content bearing in mind the target audience and the marketing goals. Different types of content may be needed for different types of goals.

For instance, Facebook content must be such as to build engagement with your community of fans and prospects

Blog posts are generally used principally to build online credibility and earn the trust of customers.

Exhaustive content like eBooks and webinars can help develop your email list for mass mailings

Content creation and publishing is only the first step in your content marketing efforts. There is no purpose creating content unless you take suitable steps to market content.  Marketing your content needs to include both organic and paid marketing tactics – for example:

• Posting links to content on Twitter
• Updating regularly on Facebook
• Optimizing content for search engines
• Sending content to your email list to drive readers to your blog /website
• Amplification of content on social networks with Facebook advertising, Google AdWords and LinkedIn sponsored posts

Finally, you must be able to measure the effectiveness of your digital content marketing efforts. Some success yardsticks include:

• Noticeable increase in traffic to your sites
• Increase in reactions/feedback
• The number of times your content has been shared
• Any upward increase in your email subscribers
• Number of new sales leads every week/month
• A marked improvement in search rankings for key words