Research and explore is my way of learning. I am not an expert in this topic, just a newbie who wants to share while I learn.
Consumers today are more educated and tend to do their own research before they decide on the purchase of a product. Content Marketing is a way to communicate to consumers by creating and sharing contents. Instead of regular sales pitch, you are helping potential customers to make decision by feeding them with relevant information.
Though Content Marketing is also seen offline (i.e.: press advertorials), I have no intention to touch it, but going straight into Content Marketing online instead.
10 Benefits of Content Marketing
- Controllable: You can monitor, measure, evaluate and tweak the message according to the response.
- Traffic Generation and Exposure: Good contents encourage sharing, which means audience will increase with RSS subscribers, newsletters/email signups, and social media followers.
- Branding: Right content can educate and shape consumers’ perception towards your brand.
- Social Engagement: Distribute your content on major social networks to gain traffic, awareness, and response.
- Relationship: Helps you make a personal connection to build relationships with internally and externally. Therefore, it is important to know who your targeted audience are and whom you are speaking to. Not forgetting internal communication is necessary as well.
- Organic Search Popularity: Good content attracts high quality links. Improve your search ranking with frequent quality content, to increase the chances of your website being crawled.
- Acquisition: Great content attracts attention and makes it easier for prospects to find your business.
- Conversions: Educate your consumers with your content to understand and clear their doubts on your product.
- Retention: Stay in touch with your customers and remind them of your presence with regular content updates.
- Measurable: Know what you want to achieve and measure to know whether the results are satisfactory. You can measure traffic with number of referrals, page views, impressions, etc.
| Types of Content Presentations Online | Acquisition | Conversion |
Retention
|
| Articles |
/
| / | / |
| Videos | / | / | / |
| Guides | / | / | / |
| Testimonials | / | / | / |
| Webinars | / | / | / |
| Reports | / | / | |
| Advertorials | / | / | |
| Infographics | / | / | |
| Forum | / | / | |
| Blogs | / | / | |
| Social Media | / | / | |
| Press Release | / | ||
| eBooks | / | ||
| Presentations | / | ||
| White papers | / | ||
| Newsletters | / | ||
| Magazines | / |
Distribution Channels
- search engine
- social media
- paid online advertising
Step by Step Guide to Content Marketing
Step 1: Recognize goals and objectives.
Step 2: Access your assets, like data, past and current analytics, database, existing social platforms, results of past campaigns etc.
Step 3: Find out who are people you want to target.
Step 4: Select the content distribution channels according to the target audience.
Step 5: Create a schedule for distribution.
Step 6: Select the Content Marketing Mix from the type of presentations which will bring you closer to your objective and audience.
Step 7: Create your message with objective and target audience in mind.
Step 8: Brainstorm on topics that can embrace your message.
Step 9: Research for information encircling your topic.
Step 10: Draft content that is not too hard sell for each type of content presentation selected (You may want to do it one by one if there’s not enough manpower. Personally, I’d start with the one that needs most content. After it is done, I’ll then adapt the content into another type of content presentation according to its target audience)
Step 11: Create content for each type of presentation selected.
Step 12: Share your content presentation to the compatible distribution channels.
Step 13: Monitor response like page views, shares, comments, etc.
Step 14: Measure and Analyze data.
Step 15: Adjust your content if needed, repeat Step 13 and 14.
Free Content Marketing Tools
# Content Marketing Planning & Managing Tools
Divvy HQ: Editorial Calendar Template. It is a Content Planning tool for you to manage your content strategy, while you keep track of deadlines, processes and production. “Freebie” Plan includes one calendar and one user.
Trello: A tool used to organize anything easily. Helps you to manage project with sets of boards and cards. There is no limit on the data storage and number of attachments a card or board. However there’s a 50Mb upload limit per attachment.
Clocking IT: A free hosted application that manages your project and timeline online. With the widgets, you can add and customize the information to be shown. When you are done, choose to print or download CSV version.
Viral Heat: Manages multi Social Media accounts, gain insights with detailed analytics, track mentions for all connected Social Media accounts and schedule publishing for future posts. Free plan links up to 7 social media accounts.
Hubspot Social Media Publishing Schedule Template
# Content Marketing Research Tools
Content Idea Generator Google Doc: Access the tool, log in with your Google account, make a copy of the file (File>make a copy>, enter keyword (for keyphrase, please add “+” in between the words instead of spacing) to cell B3, to generate the list of online resources related to the keyword. For more info on Content Idea Generator Google Doc, you may want to check out the article < Using Google Docs to Generate Hot Content Strategies> and < Content Strategy Generator Tool V2 Update>
SearchStatus: A downloadable toolbar search extension for Firefox that allows you to see how any website is performing. Page Rank and Alexa rank will be shown on the bottom right of your add-on bar. Right-click on blue icon for more selections like, highlight nofollow links, backward links and indexed pages from Google, etc.
Social Mention: A real-time social media search and analysis service that lets you track and measure what people are saying.. Simply key in the keyword to see the list of mentions, and keyword analysis.
Sparqd: The social content marketplace where you source, manage and edit your content. Subscribe to Sparqd Daily Digest, for daily posting ideas, social media tips and links to sourced contents via email.
Amplicate: They have been collating opinions from social media since 2009, and have tracked over 140 million public opinions now. Their data reveal the love or hate opinions of the topic you entered.
Trapit: Use Trapit to explore any topic and find the most relevant content in the net. You can choose to share or save on your reading list to read later.
InboundWriter: Content optimization tool that helps to create and tweak online content. Basic Plan is free for up to 4 documents a month.
Hubspot On-Page SEO Template
# Content Marketing Creation & Visualization Tools
Storify: Lets you bring together media content to build your own stories. Drag and drop quotes, videos or pictures to illustrate, and then complete your story with your own narrative.
Paper.li: Makes it easy to publish online newspapers based on the topics you like. Type in the topic and select your source from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, RSS feeds or Youtube, everything else is automated. Very little customization available. Pro version cost $9 per paper to add your logo, remove ads, and manage notifications. You can see a sample I have done here.
Scoop it: Similar to Paper.li, Scoop it makes it easy to editorially select content for your online magazine. The free account allows sharing to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Tumblr, and WordPress.
# Content Marketing Sharing & Promotion Tools
Zemanta: You can quickly link your posts to relevant images, articles, links or tags. Now available to download as a FireFox add-on. Works with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and others.
Blogdash: Find, engage and pitch large group of bloggers. Tweet or Post on Facebook to get Free Guide to Blogger Outreach
# Content Marketing Monitoring & Analytics Tools
Social Crawlytics: A tool that scan and analyses web pages. Find out where and what your competitor has shared online. You will receive some credits upon sign up. Once used up, just pay with a tweet, to get more credits.
Pinalytics: It’s a Pinterest analytics. Metrics refer to the particular pin in question. Sample search only returns with 5 results. For full results, you’ll need to register or login. At the moment, you’ll need to email in order get an invite to sign up.
Edgerank Checker: Tool to check your Facebook Page Edgerank. Free plan gives you an Edgerank Score, average best and worst, average most new fans and average loss of fans based on day of the week
Google Analytics: Shows you how visitors enter and use your site.
What is a Content Engineer?
The key difference between Content Engineers and Content Marketeers will be the emphasis of data. Content Engineer is a new breed of Marketeer who is both creative and analytical. They listen to the consumers, look at data, engineer and optimize contents required to engage customers socially.
Content Engineering jobs doesn’t seem to be very popular in Singapore, only a handful are seen within the Advertising Agencies. However, you can see more Content Marketing or some Digital/Social Media Marketing positions that encompass a portion of Content Marketing within their scope of work.
For more info on Content Engineer, you may want to check out the article < A New Breed? 7 Roles of the Content Marketing “Engineer”>
External Resources
B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends
Content Marketing Institute
Free Content Marketing Ebooks
ULTIMATE EBOOK – 100 Content Marketing Examples
100 Inbound Marketing Content Ideas
A Practical Guide to Killer Marketing Content
How to Use Dynamic Content for Better Conversions
How To Brainstorm Content That Rocks And Converts
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