Factors to decide content marketing strategy in 2018

A content marketing strategy has the benefit that it doesn’t work to improve one channel in isolation—which is the case if you have separate SEO, Social media or email marketing or company website ‘strategies’—instead, it gives a multi-channel life-cycle engagement strategy, unifying all your digital marketing communications to support customer acquisition, retention, and growth goals. Anything that can be consumed online, such as the written word, images, pictures, infographics, audio and video. By understanding your target market, and creating useful information for them, it helps both acquire new customers and also retain existing customers. An adequate content marketing plan will reduce the need for separate plans for individual digital marketing activities.

Content marketing is an important part of any business and fuels all forms of inbound techniques (email, social, paid and organic search). Having a clear and defines content marketing strategy will not only help you create content but audit and set goals, improve content distribution and help evaluate and measure ROI.

Content marketing is a mix of different channel techniques, and not just blogging or social media content.  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 majority of businesses using content marketing techniques are small businesses or people marketing teams that serve the entire organization rather than multiple brands and product lines.

Higher quality and more efficient content creation are believed to be a major factor contributing to marketers’ increased success over the last year. Content that engages the reader is likely to perform much higher. If you find your content marketing is not reaching the desired results then you may be targeting the wrong audience or have the wrong tone and content for your target audience.

Knowing what to include in your content is also vitally important. Without the right message or concepts, it’ll be difficult to get your target audience engaged. Always ensure content is fact-based and credible. This is important in crafting your reader’s trust – the more helpful and trustworthy they position you against competitors the more likely they are to keep coming back to your site instead of others.

Not understanding your audience and potential buyers will lead to disengagement of brand, purpose, and meaning. If you aren’t aware of different touch points in the buyer cycle then it’s difficult to answer their questions and help at different pain points.