5 steps to create a content marketing campaign

Content marketing–the practice of using relevant content to provide value to a target audience with the goal of increasing business–is, in essence, a pull instead of a push. It’s the process of using material to draw customers in to learn about you, whether it’s your product, your brand, your company.

Content marketing is the primary way most businesses communicate their products, services, and philosophies, with the end goal of promoting their business and services, and engaging new customers.

Your company can develop and implement an effective content marketing campaign by following these steps.

Strategy

Content strategy develops a “how” and “why” for the materials you produce. It examines all of the content you produce, and determines a way for it to fit together, to work together, and methods that can create an effective content marketing campaign. Content strategy can use metrics to determine success, and make further decisions about how content should be created in the future.

What are the goals for the company? How can this campaign successfully accomplish those goals? Using this information, create an editorial calendar to organize the creation and disbursement of your company’s content. Stick to this calendar.

For example, a fictional company makes widgets. Widget-making is a crowded market, but we want to distinguish ourselves as the foremost expert in widgetry, but our content catalog is pretty thin. So we plan on creating content over a period of time. In the first quarter, we schedule four articles to be created: What is a widget? The history of widgets. An analysis of east coast widgets vs. european widgets. Predictions for widgets in 2020 and beyond.

Content Creation

Now that your editorial calendar has been created, it’s time to build your content library. But don’t let just anyone write your content. It’s important that the material being produced to be shared and disseminated be high quality. Mediocre content won’t just produce mediocre results; it will create the impression that your company is not to be trusted, and could damage your reputation irreparably.

• Articles
• Blog posts
• White papers
• Infographics
• Visuals
• Video

Once you’ve created your content, it’s time to let the world know about it!

Promotion

Effective promotion for your article/blog/infographic/etc. is a key step in your content marketing campaign. At this point, we can refer back to the strategy portion. What was it you wanted to accomplish? If it was to reach out to business peers and become an influencer in your industry, then Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some good venues for promotion.

If you want to reach out to potential customers, then Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram should be the places where you focus your resources. For videos, YouTube is the place to go.

To improve SEO, be sure to include keywords, metadata, and alt-tags for your posts, and in a number of variations to make sure, when someone searches for anything widget-related, that your content will land higher in the search results.

Analysis

Take a look at your metrics after a period of time to find out how people are interacting with your content. Find out which sources brought the most success. Track which content is the most successful. This can show you which topics you may want to explore in the future. It can also help determine whether there’s a way to improve your traction in the other venues, or if you should focus your attentions further.

Maintenance and Growth

Take what has worked and keep doing it. Find out where your weaknesses were and try to correct them. As you develop new material in the future, you can continue to cross-link to items that were written in the past, and try to find ways to repurpose your material to maximize their distribution.

Be sure to stay on top of new developments in content marketing to find ways to improve the foothold you’ve created.