Content marketing and content strategy are dependent on each other. They are not the same thing, but they do go hand in hand. It is important to know the differences between the two if you want to be successful in content marketing.
To successfully run and improve a business, you must know how to content market. Creating content for your business does not directly promote your name. Though it does attract your reader in order to increase engagement on your site. This ultimately is the rough definition of content marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves the creation and sharing of online material. This material is what is referred to as content. Content is information that you provide for your audience. It is provided in an engaging way. The information within your content should be relevant to your business. The content that you are providing your audience is not necessarily promoting your brand, but it is leading your audience to your company.
This is a marketing technique that involves distribution of created content. This content can be anything from blog posts to videos. It can even include email marketing. Content marketing depends on great content. If you are not able to create engaging content, your marketing endeavors are not going to be successful.
This type of marketing is extremely important to your SEO success as well. In order to rank at the top of online search results, you must create engaging and high-quality content related to your industry, business, and message.
Purpose
You may be wondering what the purpose of content marketing really is. There are a lot of different marketing techniques. Content marketing is only one of them. So, what is the point of it?
The following are a few main purposes of content marketing:
- Drive traffic to your page
- Expand awareness of your brand
- Bring in revenue
- Boost SEO results
This marketing technique is a great way to improve your business. Content marketing works because it does not directly sell a product or service. When using content marketing, you are indirectly promoting your brand.
Instead of talking about your business, you are using interesting and eye-catching content to draw your consumers into clicking on it. This will increase engagement on your site, in-turn promoting your company.
Content Strategy
Content strategy is an ongoing process of turning goals for your business into a plan. This plan uses content as the primary means to reach those goals. The strategy will guide you through making decisions about content. The main point of a content strategy is to help you through content creating and publishing.
Before beginning the creation of your content strategy, remember all of the questions about the future of your company. These questions will help you create a useful content strategy. You can answer these questions for yourself while you are creating your strategy.
You can not create a useful content strategy without any goals for your business. So, the first step to creating a content strategy is creating long-term goals for your business. These goals should be realistic. They need to created after taking time to analyze your business.
Analyzing your business should involve spending time looking at revenue, as well as current marketing strategies, and audience engagement. The goals that you are setting should be aimed to increase revenue and audience engagement. You should also be focused on improving your marketing strategies as an overall goal.
Once you create realistic goals, you should focus on how you are going to reach those goals. This step involves creating numbered tasks that you can easily follow. Make these tasks extremely detailed. That will make it easier for you to follow them.
A content strategy can be ongoing. Your goals should change as you move on. Your business will hopefully become more successful through the use of this content strategy. Therefore, your tasks and goals should change.
After creating your tasks for each goal, it can be helpful to create a timeline for each goal through your entire strategy.
Content Strategies can be thought up for a company who wants to either increase their sales or increase their engagement. Creating a content strategy begins with presenting an offer to your audience. Base your offer on what you are trying to gain. If you are trying to gain new customers, you should present an offer to those who purchase from your site for the first time.
If you are trying to increase your following or your engagement on social platforms, present an offer to those who follow, comment, and share one of your posts. It is important that your offer is based on what you are trying to gain.
When you present an offer, you want to think about the value of that offer to your audience. If your offer is not valuable enough, you must improve the offer. This means improving the perception of value from your consumers. For example, if you are presenting this offer in the summer, the value of a free coat from your company would not be perceived to be as valuable as if you were giving away a free pair of shorts or a free crop top.
Once you present a valuable offer, think about who you are aiming this offer to. Does your audience often use social media? If so, you should think about which social media platforms you are going to post your offer on. If you are aiming to an older audience, you must realize that the only social media platform you may benefit from is Facebook. This is all about how you are going to reach your audience to present and explain your offer.
Your social media posts that present and explain the offer should be engaging. One way to do this is by using video to catch the attention of your followers. Videos catch viewers attention quickly and easily. The use of video and photo are interchangeable, although there are some instances where it is more obvious what you should use. If you are looking to use video, there should be some talking or music in the background. Anything that needs to be explained should be in the form of a video rather than a photo.
For example, this particular clothing company may create a post showing the behind the scenes of photo shoots for their website. This is something that would be better shown through video so the viewer can receive the whole experience and explanation. If the company was just wanting to show the final product of a photo shoot or a brand new line, that could be done well through photos.
After you create your content plan, and you know how to keep up with posting the information about it, you can see if your plan is working. If it is not, you can improve your offer. Improving your offer will help your content strategy, but it will also cause you to have to make new content to post on your social media accounts. It is important to catch the attention of your consumers so they know what the offer is and how they can get it.
Content Strategy Timeline
Content strategy timelines are detailed. The more detailed they are, the more simple they are to follow. The following example shows a full week’s content strategy. The following example displays a made-up content strategy timeline created for a fictional clothing company.
Once you have created a content strategy schedule, your content should be posted quickly as the timeline you have put together should be extremely detailed. This will make your process easy to follow in order to meet deadlines and increase your presence on social media.
Analyzing
The final detail about content strategy is how to know if it is working.
This is an important area of your content strategy because it tells you if your ideas are working. Many people neglect this area of content strategies. You must highlight in your plan how you are going to analyze the success of your strategy.
First, go through each objective and all of the tasks that you have planned out. For each objective, highlight the way in which you can measure the success to know if your strategy is working.
Next, once you know what is working and what’s not, you can create a better strategy. Changing objectives or tasks will help you move further with your goals.
After you change what isn’t working, you can focus on what is working. Then you can further your goals, add new ones, or check some off the list.
Content Marketing VS. Content Strategy
Now that we have discussed the definitions of both content marketing and content strategy, we can discuss the connections between them. Content marketing relies on content strategy. Content strategy is basically the glue that holds great content marketing.
If you are looking to advance your business through good content marketing, you must take the time to create a content strategy. That strategy will help you realize the goals that you have for your company. It will also help you thoroughly plan out the way that you want to reach those goals.
Now, with those goals and the plan that you have created, your business has a much better chance at reaching the desired outcome through content marketing.
Think of content marketing as your destination. Your content strategy is simply your map telling you how to get there.
Without your map, how will you reach your destination?
It is impossible. Therefore, you must create a content strategy. Then, you can begin to content market.
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