How to Do Content Marketing Properly by Brian Newmark

Content marketing can be really helpful for just about any business, if done properly. It can however mess things up if you do not do it with care.

Content marketing requires your finest content, self-less distributions and a bucket load of promotions to make it work. All this is difficult and requires even a budget to begin with but definitely possible.

One needs to be consistent and disciplined with their efforts to make content marketing work for them. Here in this article, we will discuss 5 steps to do content marketing properly.

1) Prepare your own domain:

Content marketing starts at home. You need to have great content on your own site to begin with. Your audience will expect to have the same quality of content on-site which they have consumed in the process of getting converted. And the first place they are going to look for great content is your business blog.

• Do you have a blog? If yes, it is time to work on it. If not, then start one now. Great blogs are built over time with great content. You need at least a dozen great flagship articles to feature on your blog and at least deliver 2 great articles a month. Along with that, you need to keep a content schedule for posting regular, informative and quality articles – keeping it twice or thrice a week is usually a good idea.

• Your email newsletter is another aspect of your on-site marketing that requires good content. It has to be consistent and must provide value. Keep sales pitches to a minimum. Write great content or re-cycle your blog posts and start delivering it a few times a week.

Emails are something that always invades privacy as it reaches your audience’s inbox. If you are inconsistent with your content or with the schedule, if your emails are not interesting to read – people will either un-subscribe or mark it as spam.

• Your Social Profiles are yet another part of your marketing strategy that requires good content.

This is different from your blog as social updates are like micro blogging. It will require more frequent updates, catchy images and really short but effective messages.

You need to build your social following as well. Say for twitter, with basic following and un-following you can easily add about 3,000+ new followers every month. Now, if you post at least one or two good updates a day that includes adding some media like images, quotes in images or videos and along with that some regular updates about 4 to 5 times a day by sharing relevant message, quotes links etc. your audience will get much more engaged. If you average a few re-tweets and get a few favourites on your new tweets, it means you are doing good.

2) Prepare your marketing content:

Now, it’s finally time to start working on the content that you will use for content marketing.

This step is crucial and must be taken proper care of because your content is the base for everything else you will do for the content marketing campaign. Your content should be interesting, it should be related to your business and your current goals, it much be informative, easily read and shareable.

In content marketing, content is given away freely. So here, the goal is to have the maximum reach for your content, let it go viral and have it consumed by a huge audience. The more it spreads, the more successful your campaign.

3) Promote your content:

Great content is useless without the marketing.

You need to promote your content over the social media and via your other promotional channels like your blog, your email list etc.

Hopefully, you have already completed your previous steps and now you have an active blog, an engaged social following and interested email subscribers. Start to leverage your reach and promote your content and let it be consumed by your already growing audience.

The next step in promotion is to use the paid promotional methods that are available to you. There are paid options for promotions in social sites like facebook, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, stumbleupon etc. Use those official paid promotions and along with that try other PPC ads like adwords etc. to gain an even larger audience.

4) Check Your Progress

Take a break. Check your progress that you made so far.

Are you getting enough traffic? Are they engaged to your content? Do they like it and share it?

If you want sales, see if people are actually buying your stuff. If you are looking for subscribers or download to your ebooks etc. check if any of your promotions so far have converted.

If not, then it is time to re-think and plan your campaign again.

5) Rinse and Repeat

See what is working and what is not. Keep doing more of the things that have worked. Drop the things that did not worked out.

Content marketing requires analysis at every step. Keep a list of things that have worked so far and build your next campaign around it to gain maximum benefits.

“Image courtesy of [David Castillo Dominici] / FreeDigitalPhotos.net”