It is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and disturbing content for a targeted audience. It is often used to achieve goals that include attracting attention and generating leads, expanding their customer base, generating or increasing online sales, increasing brand awareness or credibility, and engaging an online community of users. Content Marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free content. Companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provide valuable information to consumers, and create a willingness to purchase products from the organization in the future.  

The first step in content marketing is to determine the demands of the audience. A variety of formats can be used to convey the information afterward, including news, video, white papers, e-books, Infographics, email newsletters, case studies, podcasts, how-to guides, question and answer pieces, images, blogs, etc.

How Content Marketing can grow your business?

Content Marketing strategic marketing focused on creating and disturbing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience.  74% of companies found that marketing increased lead generation, both in quality and quantity (Curata, 2017). Businesses with a content marketing strategy achieved 27.1% higher win rates and 18.1% higher quota attainment than those without a content strategy ( CSO Insights, 2019). So by this, we can understand that every organization or company is using content marketing for its growth.

Now that you know the purpose of content marketing, let me break it down into 7 steps so you create and promote content that will deliver value to your business quickly. 

1. Identifying your target market
2. Establish a content calendar 
3. Choose and allocate resources
4. Conduct a keyword analysis
5. Create content
6. Market to your target audience
7. Measure your results

1. Identifying your target audience

Identifying your target market or marketers should always be the foundation of any marketing, let alone content marketing. It’s best practice in this situation to start developing customer personas. You can do this with both your site’s quantitative data and qualitative data.

2. Establish a content calendar 

A content calendar doesn’t need to be remotely complicated, it just needs to organize and spread out the promotion of your content and take advantage of key dates, times, and trends if possible.

This part is pretty straightforward but can be highly effective for mapping out how to drip-feed your audience as well as showing Google how active you are.

3. Choosing and allocating resources

By this point, you will have identified your customer personas and planned out the content you want to produce, and mapped out the structure in your own way. 

4. Conduct a keyword analysis

This is done by conducting and analyzing keyword research. Keyword research is basically an analysis of the types of keywords and topics people search for. Use the information you’ve collected from your identified customer personas to brainstorm a number of content ideas you think would be both relevant and useful to them. Once you’ve completed your content ideas brainstorming, you want to start identifying the keywords and phrases associated with these ideas that your users are searching for.

5. Create content

It’s simple and straightforward to focus on the reader, use your keywords and research top and make your content engaging and compelling to the reader as well as obvious to the search engine. Writing naturally and logically whilst using your homework is the simple secret to creating good content.

6. Market to your target audience

If your content is relevant, useful, and most importantly, written, The next section focuses on how to effectively promote yourself and place your material to the right users. In any good content marketing strategy, all your content produced should be your net, and what you do with the prospects you catch and how you nurture them further is up to you.

7. Measure your results

Without precise measurements, no marketing approach could be deemed successful. Often if you don’t have sufficient resources to fully manage your content, promotional channels, and analytics, tasks like this can fall by the wayside. This is why I’m going to highlight the major metrics to look out for and why they’re important.