Quick guide to content marketing

The main stages to successful content marketing are...

1. Content Planning & Strategy: Clearly defining your target audience and aligning customers' needs’ with your business goals. This process will influence themes, topics and messaging.
2. Content Creation: Using storytelling techniques to create content that engages and connects with your audience.
3. Content Sharing: Find the best media channels to get your content in front of the right audience.

Content Planning & Strategy

Select the area(s) of the business you want to focus on. Then research and clearly identify,

• the target audience
• in-house/freelance specialists who can contribute ideas and/or write the content
• topics, themes and issues relevant to your audience
• best methods of delivering the content e.g. social media, blog posts, animation, e-books…
• best channels to promote the content e.g. do your audience respond best to Facebook, Twitter or Blog posts?

Once this research is complete you will need to create a content marketing schedule. The schedule will clearly identify…

• methods you are going to use
• the channels you plan to share them on
• timescales
• contributors e.g. designers and writers
• costs
• and if applicable estimated ROI

Various software packages are available to assist with this process, or you can create your own.

Target Audience

If you haven’t already done so you will need to create your defined target audience lists. The lists should be…

• be well organised, ideally in a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) for smaller businesses simple excel sheets will do the job initially.  
• include as much information as possible about clients and prospects. Include, contact details, business sector and useful notes for example, warm lead, lead from website, client interested in new website… this will help when you analyse your data.
• separate the lists into clients and prospects. 

Content Creation

• When creating content ask yourself
• is it engaging?
• is it easy to understand?
• does is tell a story?
• does it connect with the audience?
• does it use key words?

Sharing Content

To gain maximum impact you need to adapt and share the content using as many different channels as possible. However, it is important to understand which channels your target audience respond best to and factor this into your content marketing plan.   When you adapt the content make it relevant to the reader.

For example, you have created an amazing new piece of software that is beneficial to the education sector, legal firms and accountants, the key messages will remain the same but the language should be adapted to connect to the audience.

 “our software speeds up enrolment by 25%”

“our software keeps data safe and increases efficiency for legal firms” 

“our software keeps data safe and increases efficiency for accountancy firms.”

Top Tips

• Adapt a 360 approach to content marketing ensuring that one activity sign posts to another.
• Be proactive by creating a plan but also be responsive, adding content to the plan as necessary.  
• Keep up to date with relevant issues and trends within your area of expertise
• Talk about your team, who you are and what you do
• Remember at the end of the day people buy from people so don’t be afraid to show some personality!

Contact Us

Here at First Media we offer a range of services, from webdesign and content to eLearning and events. If you need quality content and design give us a call to see how we can help! 

Call 01507 607783

Email hello@firstmedia.co.uk