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. It ultimately aims to drive profitable customer action.

Content marketing is an umbrella term covering a set of strategies, techniques, and tactics to fulfil business and customer goals by using the most relevant content to serve, attract, convert, retain, and engage customers. Content uses blogs, podcasts, video, and social media sites as a vehicle. Its a practice now being used by 86% of businesses today. However, effective content marketing is not so easy to find.

Goals of Content Marketing

Given the fact that content plays a role in virtually all marketing techniques and tactics, there are no goals that cant be reached using content. However, from a content marketing perspective, we see that marketers focus on some key goals such as −

Brand awareness
Lead generation
Engagement
Sales
Lead nurturing
Customer retention and loyalty
Customer evangelism
Up-selling and cross-selling

Although these are the typical goals found in content marketing research, think out of the box and look at the goals of your audiences.

Start Content Marketing

Here is brief set of guidelines that you can follow to start content marketing −

First, find a reason to start using content marketing. Knowing what the reason and the purpose is important. In a few years from now, people will say content marketing doesnt work. Its like in social media: people start saying it doesnt work because they often forget for what and whom they wanted it to work in the first place.
Know the different people and types of customers and prospects you want. Be aware of how they act, what they want, and how they will use your content.
Dont reinvent the wheel. Before dreaming up new content, see what you already have. Often, the best content for your customers and business is already in the mind of your customers and the people in your business. You just need to present it in a way everyone understands.
Once you know what content you have, figure out what you need.
Now, its time to get that content organized and check out the best formats and channels. Know the different formats of content your prospective customers use and there are some good tips and tricks to make sure that your content is engaging. Align the content to the types of channels you think that it will be best received.
Its time to make sure that the content is found or used! If not there is little sense in spending all the energy, is there? Promote, connect and engage.

Finally, test, measure, and optimize continuously. Try different types of content. Check analytics. Monitor your expenditure. And always adapt.

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