Content Marketing

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 Creation

Content Creation is the contribution of information to any media and most especially
to digital media for an end-user/audience in specific contexts.Content is "something
that is to be expressed through some medium, as speech, writing or any of various
arts”for self-expression, distribution, marketing and/or publication. Typical forms of
content creation include maintaining and updating web sites, blogging, photography,
videography, online commentary, the maintenance of social media accounts, and
editing and distribution of digital media.

(I) Content Link Building

Digital content creation is an important part of digital strategy. Every piece of content
you create—including eNewsletters, white papers, blog posts, case studies and more
—should be carefully crafted and designed to drive prospects to your brand, multiply
organic reach and increase conversions.

Digital Content Creation: 6 Steps to Success

After you have identified your target audience, there are several steps that can help
improve the quality and impact of the digital content creation process. Although some
steps may not be appropriate for all types of content, they are generally applicable to
most of the content generated by B2B brands.

1. Determine the purpose. Different types of content have different purposes. For example,
while case studies demonstrate your organization’s experience and expertise in specific
areas, contributed articles may be intended to inject your brand into conversions about
newsworthy topics. By determining the purpose at the beginning of the content creation
process, you can improve the likelihood that your content will achieve the desired results.
2. Create useful, quality content. In digital content creation, the rule of thumb is that every
piece content you create must be useful and relevant to the target audience. The more
useful the content is, the easier it will be for audiences to contextualize it to their situations
and share it with others in their circles of influence.
3. Promote content on social media. Share different content on each of your social media
networks to expand your brand’s reach and add scale to campaigns. The content you share
on each site should be unique to give your followers a reason to follow you on more than
one network. Blog posts and other types of content that have a lot of views, likes and shares
usually deliver higher search engine rankings.
4. Utilize photos and multimedia. Supplement your written content with photos, infographics
and videos. According to a study by MDG Advertising, content paired with captivating images
gets 94 percent more total views on average than those without. The same MDG Advertising
statistic reveals that 67 percent of online consumers consider clear, detailed photos to be
more important than product information or customer ratings.
5. Implement an SEO program. Instead of guessing keywords to use throughout your content
and hoping that it resonates with the audience, it’s more beneficial to implement a formal
 SEO strategy that leverages Google tools and other resources. A strong SEO program helps
you discover the most searched, valuable terms for your location and industry.
6. Track and analyze content. Ideally, your analytics program should go beyond simple page
views to evaluate the online behaviors of the individuals who are viewing specific pieces of
digital content. Additionally, it’s important remain aware of how well you rank in the top
search engines and continuously aim to improve those rankings.

(II) Strategic Building Block of Content Creation

These strategic building blocks are: Brand essence, market research and persona,
pillars of content, matching content formats to goals, content audit.

1. Brand essence: Every successful brand has a unique quality that differentiates it
from competitors' and give customers a sense of belonging. These attributes are
usually summarized in a sentence. This core summary is called the brand essence.

A brand essence is the main basis for a business' emotional connection with its
audience and manner of communication with both potential and current customers. To
content creators and digital marketing strategists, a brand essence is an important
guide for ensuring the content to be created is one that best fits the business.

Marketing tactics nowadays ties stories to the brand essence. In this case, the
questions for businesses become: What is your reason for existing and how do
connect your story with the interest of current and potential customers?

This is so that customers do not misinterpret or get confused about the brand promise.

2. Market research and personas: A market research is important in content

marketing as this greatly helps in developing target market personas.

According to Quirk, "the sweet spot for content marketing lies in an intercept between
marketing goals of a brand, the brand personality as it guides and differentiates that
brand in the marketplace, and the customer motivation for paying attention to a brand
at all". (Quirk, 2013)In addressing customer needs, it's important to understand your
audience and the kind of content they want to engage with. One way to address this is
the development of consumer persona.

A persona is simply a profile which an author/content marketer creates which covers

the characteristics of a target audience for whom they are writing.

Personas are majorly based on the user of your branded content and creating a profile
from those personas is all about putting into consideration characteristics of the
readers, their needs and desires.

Digital strategists should always focus on the motivation of created personas, they aid
in the proper segmentation and understanding of a brand's target market. From here,
you'll be able to create content that'll get your message across clearly and effectively
as well as identify entirely with the brand essence.

3. Pillar of Content:

The content marketing process as a framework consisting of four pillars (developed

by Uberflip’s co-founder and CEO, Yoav Schwartz): Creation, Experience,
Distribution, and Insights.

3.1 Creation

At its core, content creation consists of the ideation, drafting, editing, and
optimization of content assets. As such, it usually involves a large time investment,
and is the part of your strategy that arguably requires the most productivity and
creativity.Maximizing productivity and creativity is key to any content strategy.

3.2 Experience

Building a well-optimized content experience involves:

 Great content — This starts with the content creation pillar, but it also
involves a deep knowledge of your audience, which is fueled by the insights
pillar (the last in this framework).
 Responsive design — Your content should be able to be accessed by anyone,
anywhere, regardless of the device they’re using to consume it.
 Easy discoverability — In addition to being SEO-friendly, your content
should be easily discoverable within your blog or resource center. If your
content isn’t strategically organized to facilitate discoverability, you risk
having your visitors bounce and finding the answers they seek elsewhere.

3.3 Distribution
Distribution is the process of getting your content in circulation by sharing it with
your target audience.It involves:
A) Defining and actively participating on relevant channels
B) Building a subscriber list
C) Relationship building

3.4 Insights
The final pillar in the content marketing framework, Insights, is the destination of
understanding what content marketing tactics are actually working, and why.

4)Matching Content Formats to goals-

Setting goal is the first task for content marketing. The second task is matching with the buying
cycle. The third task is choosing topics based on the customer’s needs. For instance, doing a quick
search as the persona of someone who needs a service will show what the customer sees on the
search engine and will lend better to choosing a topic to approach what isn’t being given to them
yet.The fourth tactic is balancing these different personas and the different stages in the buying cycle.
A good content strategy uses the different types of content in a well-segmented and thought out
editorial calendar. The fifth, and possible most important, tactic is to be intentional with format. With
the different personas and points in the buying cycle balanced, the content creator should now
consider which format is best.
5)Content Audit

A content audit is the process of evaluating content elements and information

assets on some part or all of a website.

(III) Content Promotion in 2017

1. IFTTT

IFTTT hooks together apps and websites so you can create processes to automate
pretty much anything, including sharing content.  It stands for a recipe that dictates
“if ‘this’ happens, ‘that’ should happen” in response.

For example, when you publish a new blog post (the “this”), an update automatically
posts to Twitter (the “that”).

IFTTT is compatible with major blogging and social media platforms, so you can use
the tool to automate sharing new content to pretty much any platform.

How much does it cost? Absolutely nothing

2. CisionPoint

CisionPoint (or Cision for short) is a comprehensive PR tool that facilitates press
release distribution and makes it easy to monitor and analyze news coverage. Its most
useful feature (for content promotion at least) is its media database, which it says
contains profiles of 1.6 million journalists.

How much does it cost? Pricing is unique to each user.Before it implemented

bespoke pricing, a one-year license cost $5,700.

3. Outbrain
Outbrain is a content syndication tool that pushes your content out across multiple top
publishers. You probably have seen and clicked on content promoted by Outbrain –
even if you didn’t realize the company was behind it.

How much does it cost? Works on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis, with a minimum
spend of $10 a day

4. Taboola

Taboola works very (very) similarly to Outbrain, but it offers different publishing
outlets. If you want to maximize the reach of your content, it’s worth using both at the
same time.

How much does it cost? Works on CPC basis, with a minimum daily spend of $75

5. Circulate.it

Circulate.it lets you leverage your team to help promote content. You curate content
(yours and others’) and it’s sent to your team in a daily email update. The best part is
they can share the content to their social media profiles in a single click. Removing
that barrier to entry makes it far more likely your team will play ball.

How much does it cost? $9 a month for limited features and up to 1,000 monthly
shares; up to $99 a month for features and 20,000 shares

6. Hootsuite Amplify

Amplify is similar to Circulate.it in that it’s designed to boost your social reach by
encouraging your employees to share more of your content (and making it really easy
for them, too). Amplify also allows you to track who’s sharing most often and who
has the most successful posts.
How much does it cost? Hootsuite Enterprise subscribers can pay for access to
Amplify; it’s designed for bigger agencies so it won’t come cheap, but pricing is
decided on a case-by-case basis.

7. Social Warfare

One of the first rules of content promotion is to make it as easy as possible for others
to share your content. For this to happen, including sharing buttons in your content is
key.

It’s important that those sharing buttons are featured prominently and look good. On
that note, if yours still look like this, it’s time to upgrade.

Social Warfare is a WordPress plugin that offers attractive sharing buttons proven to
boost shares and, unlike many other sharing buttons, never slow down your site.

Sharing buttons should be featured prominently & look good. Upgrade

with @warfareplugins, says @SujanPatel. Click To Tweet

How much does it cost? Free; pro accounts start at $29 a year (for access to all
features, including Twitter cards and in-post tweetable quotes).

8. Triberr

Triberr connects groups of people who are interested in and create content on similar
topics (called “tribes”). They share content to support other tribe members’ content
promotion efforts.

How much does it cost? Free

9. Viral Content Bee

Viral Content Bee shares some similarities with Triberr in that it’s a community built
around content promotion. You share content other members have produced and, in
return, they will share content you’ve produced.

How much does it cost? Free

10. Medium

Medium is an open publishing platform that allows you to publish articles on almost
any subject. Think of it like a blog that anyone can post to. Best of all, you’re free to
repost content originally published. Do this and you get instant access to a new and
big audience (SimilarWeb reports that the site gets close to 100 million visitors a
month).

How much does it cost? Free

11. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a content marketing CRM. It helps organize and streamline content

promotion. You can build lists of contacts and manage your relationships with each
one and even send emails from within the tool. You can also create email templates
and track whether your emails are being opened and your links are getting clicked.

How much does it cost? $24 a month for up to 100 contacts; $229 a month for up to
100,000 contacts; $999+ for custom packages

12. MeetEdgar

Edgar is a social media scheduling tool with a bit of a difference. Unlike platforms
like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, which require you to add new content if you want to
keep sharing, Edgar is “an automated queue that never runs out of content.”

Once Edgar has shared everything you’ve added, it reshares older updates that your
followers might have missed.

How much does it cost? $79 a month; $588 a year

13. Bitly

Bitly creates shortened links to track the performance of your content once you
promote it. Just be sure to include a bitly link – not the actual URL – in your content
promotion. If you create a custom short link for each content promotion campaign,
you can track what works well and what doesn’t.

Create a custom short link for each #content promotion campaign so

you can track it. @SujanPatel. Click To Tweet

How much does it cost? Free for general use; enterprise packages for branded links

14. OptinMonster

OptinMonster helps you build up your email list. This is, for me, key to promoting my
content by ensuring that I’m getting it in front of people who care about my content.
OptinMonster does this by helping you build high-converting lead-generation forms.

How much does it cost? $9 to $29 a month

15. MozBar

You may be familiar with Moz’s Chrome extension, MozBar, although you might not
think of it as a content promotion tool. I find the ability to view a site’s domain
authority at a glance to be invaluable when qualifying sites that I’m considering
promoting content to.
How much does it cost? Free

16. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is perhaps best known as a content discovery tool, but it’s also excellent
for identifying influencers who might be interested in viewing and sharing your
content.

To switch over to this part of the tool, just click the “influencers” tab at the top of the
page. Then, simply search for your topic of interest. You can filter the results
according to the type of influencer you want to approach.

How much does it cos

t? Free limited access; $79 and up for pro accounts

17. Zurb

Your subject line almost single-handedly dictates whether your email gets opened.
Zurb shows how your subject line, as well as your sender name and pre-header text,
will render on popular mobile devices.

How much does it cost? Free

18. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach helps you find influencers and identify opportunities (more than 5
million influencers in its database). It then allows you to automate outreach, track
your contacts, and organize your campaigns.

How much does it cost? $49 a month for an individual account; up to $599 for an
enterprise account

19. Sniply

Sniply allows you to enhance every link you share (whether your own content or
someone else’s) with a call to action. Use the CTA to encourage the viewer to visit
your site and consume your content.

When people click on the Sniply-generated link, they can view the article you shared
and see a CTA.