GETTING STARTED ON CONTENT MARKETING/ BLOGGING

1. Intro to content marketing

With so many businesses operating online, standing out from the crowd is essential. Content marketing is a great way to help you attract your audience’s attention.

Here, we’ll look at why content marketing is important, and how you can use it to engage with your audience. We’ll also introduce some best practices to help you create your own content marketing campaigns.

Content marketing is based on the creation and sharing of online material, like videos, blogs, and social media posts. It’s designed to generate interest in a company’s products or services by capturing people’s attention.

It can also help to increase sales by directing traffic to your website, boost awareness of your brand and build trust and recognition amongst your audience.

Let’s journey back to the days before the web, when TV, print and radio dominated. Two-way interaction wasn’t possible between brands and customers and audiences received advertising messages whether they wanted them or not. These days, people can pick and choose when they engage, and content marketing allows businesses to connect with their audiences like never before.

Imagine you run a Hair Dressing Salon business, and want to use content marketing to increase awareness of your business and drive more traffic to your website. To achieve this, you could publish engaging content about hair style on your website’s blog, and promote it across the company’s social media platforms to increase readership.

Great content campaigns are based on understanding who you’re writing for. The more you know about your audience and share their passions, as well as their pains, the easier it will be to engage them on a personal level.

Try considering the challenges or pain points your customers face, and then tailor your content to these insights. For the hair dressing salon business, for example, pain points for customers could include a lack of time, bad weather, or simply wanting to keep their hair healthy.

Next, let’s cover some effective content marketing practices. The key to success is creating a content marketing campaign that accomplishes three things:

(1) answering your audience’s questions,

(2) providing something of value and

(3) keeping them wanting more.

Here are a few best practices to keep in mind as you put together your own strategy:

* Take the time to get to know your audience better.

* Look at which accounts they follow on social media to get a sense of their likes and interests.

* Experiment to find the best types of content for reaching your audience and don’t be afraid to use multiple formats.

* Choose the right places to publish your content and make sure you’re talking directly to your audience

* Throw away the business speak and stock responses, and prioritise natural language to interact with your audience.

* Make your content unique, interesting and exciting.

* Use engaging headlines, eye-catching pictures and informative language to capture your audience's attention.

By keeping these pointers in mind when creating a content marketing strategy, you can boost your potential reach and strengthen your presence online.

When starting to write your own content marketing strategy remember the three keys to success mentioned earlier:

Focus on answering your audience’s needs

Create content they’ll find valuable

Keep them engaged so that they’ll visit you in the future for more content.

Now, try brainstorming how content marketing can be used to engage your audience online, and consider what goals it could help you achieve.

Key learnings

With so many businesses and brands online, content marketing is a valuable tool in helping you to stand out. In this lesson, we'll explore:

What content marketing is, and why it can add value to an online business

Best practices for creating your own content marketing strategy.

2. Get to know your online customers

Everyone is different, so when it comes to creating online content it’s good to think about who your audience is, and what they want to know. This is where audience segmentation can help.

Here, we’ll explain what audience segmentation is and how it can be used to improve your content marketing campaigns.

Segmentation involves dividing your audience into groups of who they are and what they like. Rather than spending time and money targeting a wide range of people, segmentation helps to identify the groups most interested in your product or service. The result is a more cost effective and persuasive way to connect with potential customers.

By researching your audience and segmenting them into groups, you can then create specific content that excites, entertains and engages them.

For example, imagine a new hair dressing salon business building its content marketing strategy. The first step would be to segment potential audiences and identify who would benefit from its service: this could be ladies who don’t have enough time to go to salon, or ladies who want to socialise with people.

The next step would be to create content with that specific group in mind. For the busy ladies segment, this could include helpful content about hair care, or a guide on how much daily hair care is good for ladies.

But why exactly is audience segmentation so important when creating and distributing content?

Understanding the habits and preferences of an audience can help you target content directly to that specific group of people.

For example, if you’re looking to launch a new Salon, and your website analytics reveal that young people are statistically more interested in barbing than fixing weavon, this would suggest you should target your content to this group.

Another benefit is being able to pinpoint audience behaviour and using this information to refine your marketing approach. Now that you know people are interested in barbing, you could research a step further and find out how often this segment people barb and at what time of day. Try to answer: What social channels does this group use? What do they do with their free time? For example, people who enjoy the visual nature of a social media platform like Pinterest are likely to prefer different content to those who like to read and contribute to forums. All this information can provide value when it comes to creating tailored content for this group.

To get insights into what people search for, you also can utilise analytics features on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to get a glimpse of audience demographics and behaviours. Experiment with a number of tools and compare results to get a more complete picture of who your audience is, and how they behave online.

Finally, don’t forget to talk to people. It may be easy to forget in this online world, but connecting with people face to face can yield some truly unique insights into who they are and what they need.

To wrap up, here are some questions for you to contemplate:

* Why is audience segmentation so important in content marketing?

* How can it help brands when creating and distributing content?

* And which tools can you explore to better understand your audience?

Key learnings

Making sure you are saying the right thing, to the right people, and are connecting with them at the right time is critical when it comes to content marketing. In this lesson, we'll explore:

* What audience segmentation is and how it can benefit a business

* How to use audience segmentation to boost your content marketing efforts

* Some of the tools and systems available to help you segment your audience correctly.

3. Choosing the right format for your content

Online content can take lots of different forms: from case studies and ebooks, to infographics, images and video clips. Each of these different formats comes with its own benefits; whether it’s to inspire, educate or entertain.

Here too, we will explore popular content formats and explain how to choose formats based on the specific needs of your audience.

Whatever format you choose, the purpose of content is always the same - to connect with an audience. This audience, in turn, will engage, share, learn, and perhaps even convert into customers.

Let’s start by exploring some popular content formats.

Blogs are typically published as a subsection of an existing website, and can include original content or guest-authored content. Writing unique, quality blog posts can help increase publicity and give you interesting content to share across other channels, like social media.

Infographics are informative and a great way to present knowledge visually. They work well online thanks to their eye-catching format and can help present complex or unusual content in a creative way.

Ebooks are educational, easy-to-read guides focused on a specific topic. This format provides readers with practical content and will help you stand out as an expert in your field.

Videos can include anything from product demonstrations to tutorials and customer testimonials. They allow brands to create engaging, entertaining, and useful content that can be consumed on the go.

There are many other content formats to consider, including: press releases, webinars, reviews and case studies. To explore even more content formats, please check out the additional links provided at the end of this topic.

Successful content doesn’t have to go viral or reach millions of people. Focus on the creating content should be tailored to your audience, and design it so that it moves customers towards a specific goal or action.

Now that you’re familiar with different formats, the next step is to consider the main goal of your content. In content marketing, there are typically four main purposes of content, which are:

To entertain

To inspire

To educate, and

To convince.

Let’s take a look at how to match different content formats to your content goals.

Meet Madam Mercy. Madam Mercy runs a hair dressing salon, and she looking to create a content strategy to help boost her online presence.

To entertain her audience, she decides to publish some video clips of her styles over social media. To inspire, she plans to create a forum space on her website where people can post their questions and get insights from both her and others hair styles. To educate her audience, she shares blog posts including top tips on hair care and hair nutrition. To convince people to use her services, she’ll share testimonials from happy customers, as well as ebooks to showcase her knowledge in specialist grooming skills.

In your own business scenario, consider how certain formats are best paired with specific content goals. For example, if your goal is to educate, then guides, ebooks and infographics would be the ideal formats –whereas if your goal was to entertain, a better format choice would be quizzes or competitions.

When assessing which content formats are the right fit for your goals, think about the ones you can easily produce yourself, and consider recruiting assistance for those you can’t. Identify the purpose of your content, and then select the formats best suited to that goal. Finally, when designing your content, remember to consider your audience, and address their specific needs in a format that will wow them.

Key learnings

Content is much more than just text on a screen. From entertaining GIFs to blog posts, whitepapers, and full-length videos, understanding which content format can make the most impact on your audience is critical. In this lesson, we'll explore:

* Popular online content formats.

* The four main purposes for content marketing.

* How to match different formats to your content goals.

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