According to Point Visible …

73% of B2B marketers say their strategy includes a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing business process, not simply a campaign.

And no wonder, there is a lot of noise about content marketing out there. As we have seen in the previous chapter, content marketing is the process of creating valuable, relevant and helpful content in order to attract and engage a well-targeted audience group. This is why businesses need content marketing. This is why content marketing has become a literally vital and critical aspect of being visible in today’s digital busy world. An this is why you need to pay a great attention to the following tips when you are developing a content marketing strategy for your business …

And that’s the biggest challenge for every internet marketer: getting heard through all of that noise. As I said, there is a ton of information out there and on top of that it’s a complex multi-device and multi-channel world where your customers’ attention is highly divided among different areas, platforms, etc.

In other words, the attention that they actually have for you is very scarce. But a well-grounded, powerful content marketing strategy can help you break through that noise! Unfortunately, creating relevant, value-packed content and successfully developing a content marketing strategy for your business is not easy at all. And of course, content marketing is much more than just content production. There is also SEO, link-building, promotion, monitoring, optimization, etc. Basically, any basic content marketing process should involve at least 8 mandatory steps:

• Aligning your content with your goals.

• Business objectives, main and secondary messages, desired actions, etc.

• Technological considerations.

• Choosing the perfect design and the appropriate content type, structure and style.

• Editorial calendar.

• Creating valuable and unique content.

• Optimizing your content for SEO and link-building.

• Mapping the content to the sales funnel.

• Defining a diversified multi-channel promotional strategy.

• Finding the most efficient ways to monetize your content.

• Tracking your results and optimizing the poorly performing marketing elements.

• Leveraging the power of content curation.

Got scared? Don’t be! We are going to discuss all these important sub-topics. Right now, you need to focus on something else: to hard-wire – or re-wire – your brain for success achieved through thought leadership. Relax, I am not talking about a surgical intervention … All you have to do, is to accept and to follow 5 basic rules:

1. You always need to be relevant and available for your target audience

Wwhile you are trying to connect with your audience in that complex, multi-channel, multi-device world, you should never forget that content marketing engages individuals on their own terms.

2. The content must be aligned with its purpose

In order to achieve different objectives (lead generation, thought leadership, brand awareness, etc) you are going to need different content types and content formats

3. The content must be a right fit for the delivery channel too

You’ll have to create different types of channel-specific content for every communication channel. A social media post for example won’t work very well in an email campaign …

4. Your content marketing should rely on clear pre-defined metrics

You should always create your content with a specific end-goal in your mind (10 new customers, 25 new subscribers, 50 new followers, etc).

5. The real power of content marketing lies in evergreen content

Putting aside certain trend-related or time-sensitive content types, content marketing has to be (almost always) evergreen. In other words, your content should last months or years.

So, keep in mind the above rules when you are developing a content marketing strategy for your business and trying to define what content marketing means for you or your business, because they will help you to become a trusted source of information and to achieve your content marketing objectives. Which bring us to the next lesson …