You may be producing content for your business, but when does producing content become content marketing? Has your current social media content or blog content become content marketing?
What is Content Production?
Content production is the act of producing content. Examples of content include:
- YouTube videos
- Podcasts
- Social media content (videos, images, articles, and posts)
- Blog content
- Lead magnets
- Case studies
- White papers
- E-books
Effective content is produced to provide value to an ideal customer in order to warm a lead. The purpose is to build trust and/or a connection with ideal customers.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the act of getting your content out there in front of your target audience. Think of it like regular marketing with your content as the product.
A content marketing strategy starts before the content is even produced. Content produced with a marketing strategy in mind is much more effective than content produced on a whim.
How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy
Building an effective content marketing strategy is all about planning. A clear plan will help you make purposeful decisions rather than producing content at random.
Define Your Goals For the Content
Start at the result you want and work backwards. In an ideal world, what do you want this piece of content to do? This could be:
- Buy a product
- Sign up for your newsletter
- Follow you
- Email you
- Book a discovery call
- Share the content with a friend
While defining your goal, think about your target audience and where the content will be displayed too.
Plan the Content
Next, plan out the content. In addition to defining the end goal of the piece of content, decide the best type of content to achieve that goal. For example, will your content be most effective if it is entertaining, funny, or informative?
If you are posting the content on a platform that accepts content in multiple formats, you also need to decide what format will be best. The platform, message, and audience preferences should all be considered.
No matter if you are producing the content yourself or outsourcing your content production, you need to create an outline. Write down your CTA (call to action) and key points you want the article to cover. If you are outsourcing your content production, give them a brief about your target audience and brand voice as well.
Produce the Content
The next step of your content marketing strategy is to produce the content. Stick to the plan you created in order to make your content as effective as possible.
We recommend jotting down ideas that come to you as you produce your content and keeping any produced content that you end up cutting due to relevance. They may not be relevant for this piece of content but can be repurposed in another way. For example, if you film a video or podcast and take out a point because it doesn’t add much to the video, you could use it as a TikTok video or reel instead. If you are writing an article, then a cut paragraph could be repurposed into a social media post.
Post the Content
When posting the piece of content, plan in advance your hashtags, links, captions or anything else you need to increase the organic growth potential. If you rush this process, you may risk limiting the reach of your piece of content.
Create a strategy for your hashtags, links, and captions in order to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. For example, our Instagram strategy specifies a list of hashtags for the following purpose:
- General hashtags for our industry and niche
- Category hashtags for the common topics we discuss
- Service hashtags for specific aspects of copywriting we may discuss or services we may promote
When we post a piece of content, we pull the hashtags from the relevant lists, so we only have to come up with a maximum of 5 specific to that piece of content. That may not be right for you, but we recommend having a few hashtags you use consistently. It cuts down your hashtag research time and ensures you always reach your target audience.
We also organise our links and write our captions in advance to ensure they are as meticulously planned as our content. This saves time because we can batch all of the spell checking and writing. But it also allows us to strategise a little better because we can look at our content as a whole. We can make sure it fulfils a purpose as a whole as well as individually.
Promote the Content
There are two ways to promote your content:
- Organic promotion
- Paid promotion
Both require you to create high-quality content that adds value and connects to your ideal customers. Paid promotion only increases the reach of your content, not the effectiveness.
Organic promotion requires you to build an engaged following. Interact with your following and other people in similar industries or niches in order to build a following that interacts with and shares your content.
Paid promotion means you pay the social media platform or Google to promote your content. You can narrow down the parameters to match your target audience and pay per click. If you choose to use paid promotion, take the time to calculate the ROI (return on investment) of promoting a particular piece of content. Content that attracts new followers may not be the best type of content to promote; you may want to focus on promoting content that sells your products or promotes a lead magnet.
Keep Producing Content
Once you have posted your content, you need to keep producing content. Your content marketing strategy needs to be working to constantly warm your leads. Social media content should work to build likeability and trust. That should link to long-form content like podcasts, blogs, or videos. That long-form content should lead to downloadable content like lead magnets, e-books, video workshops, and white papers. The downloadable content should lead to sales.
Your content should link into each other and provide clear directions to the next step in your content marketing strategy.