Content Marketing Agency

Before building either a content strategy or a content marketing strategy you must first have a brand strategy, which will define what first impression you want to give the customer, what type of brand you are and how it will capture the attention of your ideal audience.
Instead of looking at the difference between content strategy and content marketing strategy look at how the two can work together to make it run smoothly and deliver the best customer experience.

Think of the content strategy part as the planning aspect. That starts with the discovery phase; identifying your ideal customers, what content they consume and where they consume it. It should establish which channels you need to be across, how do these fit in with your ultimate goals and help you create sustainable and consistent messaging on every medium.

Following that, the content marketing strategy should then put the wheels in motion and distribute your content. This is the part where you find relevant bloggers, journalists etc to write about your product. It is crucial to build relationships and networks at this stage as it will help you get consistent and sustained coverage. Then you can amplify that on the relevant social channels decided in the content strategy.

Let’s start by defining content curation. This is simply adding your own tone of voice to a collection of content from various sources on a topic that you then publish and share.
With that in mind, the first thing to do is define your topic. This has to be something your customers will find interesting/engaging. The information you curate has to be relevant and useful to your audience, whether that is industry news, customer reviews, top 10 lists, interviews, presentations the list is endless.

Once you have established your audiences’ interests, it’s then time to collect the content. With vast mediums of digital content now readily available, it is easy to obtain interesting content from videos, articles, webinars, social media posts, infographics etc. Utilising the best content out there will help your audience find answers efficiently and reward you with higher engagement levels.

Adding your voice is the next step. Let the audience know why they should engage with the content you curated and how they can get the most out of it.

Then publish it! Again, keeping your customers in mind, which marketing channels gets the best engagement from?

Before starting a content marketing strategy, it is of vital importance that you can answer key questions that define the purpose of the proposed strategy.
Firstly, who exactly is your target audience? Is there an age range? Is it gender specific? Are you targeting children, teenagers, adults? Build the best picture possible of the target audience.

What’s the main purpose/goal? This could be to increase sales, create brand awareness, collect new leads, drive traffic to the website.

There are endless possibilities of what this could be, but it is important to define a specific goal/purpose before starting a campaign.

Answering these questions will help you achieve your goals quicker.

Creating quality content doesn’t guarantee a huge audience, it is just part of the puzzle. Distribution is often an afterthought for many marketing teams, with most of the focus going into actually getting the content together and then coming up with a distribution strategy after.
Simply sharing on social platforms or the website isn’t really enough to get maximum reach. Pitching the content to relevant industry newsletters should be part of your distribution plans. If the content is good, you should have no issue getting coverage from industry newsletters, as most are usually on the lookout for quality relevant content. Should you fail though, ask what content they are usually interested in and maintain good relationships with the editors – this will increase your chances of future coverage.

Don’t be scared to pitch to top publishers too, but it is important not to make your story too much like an advertisement or promotion. Instead, an interesting angle or opinion is much more interesting and likely to be picked up.

Make sure the content isn’t too technical for the masses because the audience for top publications is obviously very different to industry related publications.

Recycling content is also a potential avenue to explore. This does not mean posting the content as it is again though. Looking for a new angle, changing the format (e.g. using a different infographic) or posting on new channels are all ways of recycling content and gaining more coverage.

A clever content strategy is all about having an end goal in mind. What data will help them make better decisions about their tactics?
What questions do you need to ask? What data can you use to answer these questions? What kinds of things do you wish you knew already? How do you think about social media marketing for instance?

Try to think about this in terms of a large business’ staff member (a developer) who has to create a new tool for its social media managers, what should he build? What would you find useful to know?

All content created should align with what services or products you are promoting. So if you are promoting a specific product the content you create should either teach, educate or inform something that lends a prospect to realising they need the relevant service you actually offer. So if you’re selling a horse training manual, your content should be aligned with training horses (i.e. common misconceptions, best methods and the other myths etc).

Simply put, SEO video refers to video that is optimised for search engines. Video content is prevalent in the online space right now, and we can use SEO video to direct traffic to your site rather than the video hosting platform.

An effective content strategy is useful because it creates sustainable, engaging, cohesive and meaningful content that attracts your target audience. Right now, it’s essential to send the appropriate message to the relevant customer at the proper time, and that’s what content strategy helps you do. It attracts, engages and builds customer trust.

Content development is an aspect of content marketing, in which you first develop the information before you market it.

A lot of great companies around the globe have used content marketing to garner a lot of interest. Companies like Wendy’s, a fast food restaurant chain in America used content marketing on Twitter to switch the attention of their target audience from rivals like Burger King and McDonald’s. Some other examples include Zomato, Nike, Rolex, Apple, Coca-Cola, Buffer, and Old Spice.

You can measure the success of content marketing by using Google Analytics to measure user demographics and behavior, using Hootsuite to track social media shares, follower growth and comments — the higher the dividends, comments, and followers, the higher the success of your content marketing. Use metrics like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), MQLs per channel, MQLs to Sales Qualified Leads, open email rates, and click-through rates to determine the ROI of your marketing efforts.

It does, when you have the proper creation and promotion strategies. Many customers first engage in research before making a purchase. This is why content marketing will always work for brands that are adequately prepared. Content marketing doesn’t work without high-quality content and long-term commitment.

There are many reasons why having a content marketing strategy can be of great benefit to any type of business. Firstly, it allows you to easily identify exactly who your target audience is, which in turn allows you to tailor your strategy to them and position your business or product as a solution to their problem.
Having this in-depth knowledge of your target market allows you to create content that resonates with them, using it to create brand awareness, expand the customer base, increase sales, engage an online community of users and more.

Defining your content marketing strategy requires this depth overview of your target audience as well as knowledge of competitors, a SWOT analysis of your solution and how it relates to the prospective audience’s needs.