Marketing promotion: How to start content marketing from scratch?

What is content marketing ? Why do content marketing? How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?

In recent years, I believe everyone has noticed that more and more people are talking about "content marketing". Well, “content marketing” is not a new topic. Judging from Google Trends, the popularity of content marketing has been soaring.

However, many people are still confused about what content marketing is and how to do it. This article will teach you step by step how to do content marketing from scratch.

(Note: Since the author has been engaged in overseas promotion and operation, this article only focuses on overseas content marketing.)

What is content marketing?

We’ve all heard that “content is king”. For previous SEO practitioners, content might just be text.

For YouTube celebrities, content might just be a video. For a photographer, the content might be a picture. Many people naturally regard content marketing as marketing created through a series of combinations such as text, video, and pictures.

Is this really what content marketing is all about?

Let’s first take a look at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)

This is how it is defined, and I think it is the most accurate one.

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 — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

“Content marketing is a marketing method that produces and publishes valuable, relevant, and continuous content to attract target audiences, change or strengthen their behaviors, and generate commercial conversions.”

Let’s look at some key words: “valuable, relevant and sustainable”. This is a customer-oriented marketing that stands from the user’s perspective and takes the needs of the target audience into consideration. It can be seen from this that the key points of content marketing are "focusing on target customers", "valuable content" and "active attention".

Change the way you promote yourself. Don't brag about how great you are. Instead, demonstrate professionalism, establish a humane and trustworthy image, and focus on users rather than the product itself. Because customers don’t care about you, your product or service; they care about themselves. This is the so-called WIIFM principle (What's in it for me).

The content does not necessarily have to be entirely about the product, but it must touch upon the concerns of the target customers, which is an important part of content marketing. When Ogilvy’s founder, Mark Ogilvy, was doing advertising for Ogilvy, he would place large advertisements in newspapers, with content such as how much you should spend on advertising and how to launch new products. He shaped his own KOL image by delivering valuable content.

The forms of content are also very diverse. It is not just videos, blogs, posts, pictures, webinars, white papers, e-books, but also coupons or even a song.

Why Content Marketing?

Maybe many people are still wondering why content marketing has suddenly become a trend?

With the popularization of the Internet, more and more consumers can obtain information independently through the Internet, the channels for learning have greatly increased, and the difficulty of obtaining information has been greatly reduced. In addition, the competition in advertising and marketing is becoming increasingly fierce, the CPC is increasing, and it is difficult to maintain the ROI to the high profit level of the original bonus period.

According to CMI data, content marketing generates 3 times more leads and 6 times higher conversion rates than outbound marketing. It is becoming increasingly important to attract and change consumers' perceptions and behaviors by creating content that interests them.

However, it must be mentioned that content marketing is not a new product that has suddenly emerged in recent years. A long time ago, some businesses started content marketing, but it was not called content marketing at that time. The Michelin recommendations that are very popular nowadays are actually the dining guides that Michelin Tires used to provide to target customers.

Michelin restaurants are famous, but it is really unknown how much conversion the Michelin Guide has brought to Michelin tires. After all, from the perspective of consumers, providing valuable and attractive content is content marketing, which is only the first half of marketing, and the most important thing is conversion.

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?

Well, as early as 2016, when I first started doing content marketing in a 2C cross-border e-commerce company, I was also very confused. I always felt that content marketing was just about writing a few blog posts, taking a few beautiful pictures, and posting a few attractive posts. This is a big and common misunderstanding.

However, compared with the content operation on the 2B side, the operation on the 2C side will be relatively simple, because you may not need as many other departments as 2B companies, such as pre-sales, technical service and other departments to cooperate to obtain case studies, stories and other information.

As a starter, you don’t need to consider the macro level like Pam Diller, former Chief Content Officer of Intel. You need to combine the key points of content planning with business goals.

How can we create brand original content BGC when we lack the ability to find suitable PGC and our products are not widely available enough for users to generate UGC?

Step 1: Clarify your goals

Cooperate with the company's pace to achieve marketing or sales goals. Plan the content release calendar for the year based on the company's key products, major public relations activities, exhibitions, sales peak and off-peak seasons, and key national holidays or universal festivals.

When doing content marketing, if it is not driven by senior management, you will encounter a lot of resistance, not only from the internal team, but also from the external team. Well, as a member of the marketing department, I was promoting a long-term Belt and Road Initiative. The Belt and Road Initiative involves many countries and a long period of time, which requires a high degree of cooperation from all regions. When holding a kick-off meeting with other pre-sales departments, the leader of the sales department focused on one issue: this project sounds very large and macro, and we have invested so much manpower, but what direct benefits can it bring us?

There are so many questions like these. So before doing content marketing, you must be clear about what your goals are. What is the purpose of content marketing? Is it to increase brand sentiment, improve interaction rate, or get more leads?

Step 2: Output brand tone based on brand tone

Content marketing is also a process of building brand image. Some large companies have their own branding departments that require the tone of content releases to comply with brand VI standards. , maintain content consistency. It is necessary to clearly define the requirements for content development and define the writing style and design.

When people talk about brand tone, they may think of Apple or Coca-Cola. Take Schneider as an example. As soon as I saw its brand color or its slogan: life is on, I knew it was Schneider's content.

The picture comes from Schneider's Linkedin account: https://www.linkedin.com/company/schneider-electric/

Step 3: Identify target customers through personas

Or crowd profiling analysis. The purchasing process and decision-making cycle of 2B enterprises are much longer than those of 2C enterprises. Select a typical customer from among the many buyers and draw a character portrait. It can help us better understand users' concerns, consumption preferences, demands and needs.

When producing content in the future, we can base it more on our target audience, population, and content themes, and choose topics that can address audience needs and solve user pain points, needs, and desires.

For example, Blendtec, an American brand of blender, became popular on YouTube through a series of “will it blend” videos. Based on the needs of food processor users (good quality, not easy to break), and combined with Apple products such as iPhone and iPad, we created a series of videos about blending Apple products. Even if the phone or tablet is broken, the blender remains intact.

Step 4: Take inventory of existing content

Are there any previous press releases or published content? Here is a small suggestion. When taking inventory, evaluate whether there is any content that users particularly like and pay special attention to, which can be developed again. (*Content is not a one-time thing. Content that users are interested in can be developed multiple times and presented to the target audience in different forms.)

For example, LogPhythm produces a report in multiple forms, developing and disseminating content multiple times in the form of infographics, documents, blog posts, videos, etc.

Image source: Forrester webinar

Step 5: Combine products and user interests to output SEO keyword list

Firstly, combining content marketing with keywords is beneficial to the promotion of the website. Secondly, it can expand the subsequent content writing topics based on these keywords. There are many tools now, such as buzzsume and semrush, which can capture popular content; based on your keywords, you can capture data on popular content related to related keywords, combine and analyze popular content to grasp popular trends; you can even recommend writing topics for your soft articles based on keyword big data. You don’t have to accept them all, it can also be a source of inspiration.

Taking the Solar inverter keyword as an example, you can see the topic content related to the solar inverter keyword. In the corresponding content section, you can also see the website titles and questions that rank top in the keyword. You can expand the content that users are interested in by combining the popular pages and reference popular questions.

Step 6: Manage and evaluate content production results, and regularly add and delete content

It is not enough to just publish the content. Instead, we need to continuously analyze the effectiveness of the content based on the impact of the published content on brand sentiment, interaction rate, etc. Moreover, the content is constantly updated. We must grasp the core content and make good use of it, and also explore some new available content.

Source: Echo Yan