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Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling.

Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

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Page 1: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing Primer

December 2015

Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling.

Page 2: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerIntroduction

How can marketers influence buyers at any customer touchpoint point along the buyer journey? The answer is, “With Content Marketing.”

Is content marketing for real? Is it actually something new? Maybe?

It’s because of the diversity in medium and context that content marketing has come to the forefront. As it should, because with so many points by which to connect with and engage consumers, content touches all of them. It is at these very touchpoints that content begins to affect the buyer journey.

Like many of our clients are asking, you probably are, too: What exactly is content marketing. How is it done? Is it necessary? Answers to those questions and more are contained herein.

This Primer is a quick general overview with some solid nuggets of info that will help you get your content game on.

Page 3: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat is 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.” - The Content Marketing Institute

Furthermore, the Content Marketing Institute says that the purpose of content marketing is to attract and retain customers by “consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior.”

The understanding behind content marketing is that by providing valuable information to consumers along their purchase pathway, they will become buyers and maybe even evangelists for your brand.

Yet, it’s a lot easier said than it is done and this is where a content marketing strategy comes in handy.

Page 4: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat IS a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is the blueprint of a digital marketing campaign and determines how content will be used in a strategic manner for the planning, production, promotion, and measurement of content marketing efforts.

This is such a critical part of content marketing success, that it’s worth ensuring we fully understand the differences between these four words.

• Strategy• Tactic• Objective• Goal

A strategy is carried out with tactics. Objectives are milestones on the way to a goal. Another way to look at it is that typically, a strategy employs tactics and a goal is comprised of objectives.

Page 5: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include?

A content marketing strategy is comprised of various milestone elements that support and align with specific business goals and objectives.

Here are a few typical objectives to consider including in a content marketing strategy:• Lift brand awareness in specific markets, platforms, or among certain

demographics• Engage and drive traffic from referring sites and platforms• Aid in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts

But, to reach these kinds of objectives, a content marketing strategy needs to addressThe following 10 critical milestones;• Identify the target audience of your content – who is your buyer?• Establish a content baseline – what engages your audience, what’s trending? • Establish content publishing guidelines (kinds of content, frequency, tagging,

posting times, etc).

Page 6: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued

• Define ownership of content process and governance of assets and data.• Map content to the buyer journey and sales cycle and tie-back to specific KPIs.• Integrate content into the overall marketing strategy to support existing goals and

leverage new audiences.• Provide content in different mixes for varying formats, each with their unique calls-

to-action.• Optimize content for search engines• Promote content to different buyer profiles and target audiences. • Implement, measure, review, optimize, refine, re-implement, repeat.

Lots of marketers think that content marketing is designed to get likes, retweets and to create other similar engagement. But we’re not seeking vanity metrics like that.

Page 7: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued

That’s because it’s critical for content marketing goals to support overall business goals. So, instead of Facebook Likes or Twitter Retweets, it is now, conversions and other post-click metrics that are the bar by which to be measured.

To be certain, page likes, retweets and shares do have a role in helping to create engagement with content and to help increase brand awareness. Though, in content marketing, the end-game – a converted buyer – is truly what we’re after. That takes knowing who your buyers are.

For example, if your content marketing goal focuses on lead generation, then you need to create content that is valuable enough to readers that they would trade their contact info for whatever is behind your conversion call-to-action. Even better is to offer an incentive that they simply cannot resist.

Page 8: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued

If we look at the customer journey in the presales stage, we can see (courtesy of Google) that we basically have two types of interaction groups and therefore content types;• Assisting Interaction: channels and content that build awareness, consideration,

and intent earlier in the customer journey or “purchase funnel.”• Last Interaction: channels and content that act as the last point of contact prior to

a purchase

Once we have cultivated interest in buyers, that’s when the content within customer touchpoints really begins to work. But that takes knowing who your buyer really is.

Page 9: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued

This is why establishing a customer profile and properly segmenting your audience is important. Especially in today’s market, where things like buyer affinities, geo-targeting, location-based advertising, remarketing and the ability to personalize content are all available.

Only once you’ve handled this properly can you create content that is not only personalized, but that incorporates fundamental emotional and intellectual properties that automatically speak to your customers.

Ultimately, you’ll be able to know which content works best in each channel.

Page 10: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerWhat Does a Content Marketing Strategy Include, continued

Let’s look at this Homebuyer example.

We know from experience that the once the idea to purchase a home has been decided, a consumer will typically consider many factors during the purchase process, such as;

• Location • New vs Used• Price• Performance (personalization, energy-efficiency, builder process, warranty, etc)

Therefore, producing content to address these factors enables you to create engagement with buyers (in assisting and in last interactions [Slide 8]) at various points along the purchase pathway. And if your content is good, you’ll get them to follow you and eventually to become your customer and maybe even your advocate!

Page 11: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerDefine a Content Implementation Schedule

A typical content implementation schedule includes a calendar of selected content, creation, proofreading and publishing dates, a posting process and where content is to be posted.

Things like what kinds of content (video, blog, social, etc) are required, which platforms the content will be published in, the cadence and frequency of posts and who is doing the posting are all defined within the content implementation schedule.

Page 12: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerDefine a Content Implementation Schedule, continued

From an acquisition perspective, customers you gain from syndicated content tactics are less expensive to acquire. They also tend to be more targeted and convert more easily. Consumers that are pulled to your brand have more of an affinity than customers that you push your marketing and advertising tactics on.

Besides, content promotion and distribution enables you to diversify your reach and connect with whole new groups of consumers by either syndicating your content and/or creating links between people and businesses. These kinds of content marketing tactics help to generate inbound leads.

From a consumers perspective, it’s about finding the right content, quickly. That's why many sites publish and promote content – to help create deeper interest for users.

Ultimately, syndicating your content into the places where your target consumers are will certainly help get you noticed and create interest. If your content is good, you'll drive traffic, both on and off the web.

Page 13: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerCreate a Content Promotion Plan

The content promotion process helps you decide how, where, when and how much to promote each piece of content. This includes the amount of funds to be allocated.

Getting content into the right places presents its own set of unique challenges and it helps to understand how content is classified.

The content tripartite known as Owned, Earned and Paid media has been shaping marketing and advertising for the last five or six years and is proving more important than ever in today’s messaging marketplace. Owned Media and Paid Media both have their place in the content mix, but Earned Media is often considered the holy grail of marketing and customer loyalty.

Page 15: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerCreate a Promotion Plan, continued

Here’s a quick refresher to make sure you’re on the right track:• Owned media are things like your website, social channels, blog, & places you have

public-facing content which your company produces, controls and/or owns.• Earned media are things like news stories, blog posts & articles published by third-

parties, customer testimonials and/or content voluntarily published by others.• Paid media includes things like sponsorships, search engine keyword advertising,

banner ads, magazine ads & other media that you have to pay for.

Ultimately these types of content work together to lift brand awareness, connect with consumers, build relationships and create sales.

The challenge for most businesses is to keep the Owned, Earned and Paid Content machine running with engaging, informative and relevant content, in all three areas, on a tight budget. The solution here is to develop a content optimization strategy that can be leveraged across channels.

Page 16: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerCreate a Promotion Plan, continued

Then, all things being relevant, what do you get when you have good content, in the right context? A conversion, of course.

Page 17: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerMeasure the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts

To track the performance of your content marketing initiatives, you can use a metrics program like Google Analytics. Why not use the metrics programs that are inherent with each platform? Because, remember, in content marketing, we’re not measuring vanity metrics. Instead, we’re concerned with post-click metrics like number of visitors, selective page actions, conversions and other calls-to-action.

So, we’re really looking at identifying signals in the customer experience pathway that help to cultivate e-rapport with visitors.

Page 18: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerMeasure the Success of Your Content Marketing Efforts, continued

Use the data you glean from your metrics to help accomplish the following;• Understand how buyers from different channels expect different experiences• Map customer touchpoints to calls-to-action along the buyer journey• Analyze mulitchannel KPIs to spot patterns in buyer behavior• Identify conversion sources using interaction steps to determine true channel

source of converting trafficArmed with good data and an evolving content marketing strategy, you can better optimize your landing pages and other customer touchpoints for maximum engagement and conversion.

Page 19: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing PrimerSummary

Today, everyone is a content publisher – even businesses. And like any good publisher, it takes content to win. Not only that, it requires a timely flow of relevant and engaging content to keep peoples’ interest – and to get them to take action.

Frankly, we’ve been doing content marketing for 20 years, only we’ve been calling it “messaging.” Read any of our posts going back thru our company history and you’ll see messaging as a contextual term in nearly every post.

The real difference is in how this messaging/content is being consumed today, vs any other time in history.

Though, if you employ best-practices content marketing in your efforts to reach, connect with and engage consumers, you will win them over – and that’s always good for the bottom line.

Page 20: Content Marketing Primer December 2015 Communicating With Your Audience Without Selling

Content Marketing Primer

800.536.6637 | astralcom.com/homebuilders