Creating a strategy for powerful content marketing

Content that speaks volumes is often crafted one word at a time. It stems from an idea that sparks something new and different, and gets picked up by readers who want to contribute more towards it with their own ideas. Brands struggling with content marketing have to understand that goal-oriented content wins in the end. Content that serves a purpose – whether it is to inspire people from across the globe or to entertain a chosen few – must deliver on its promise and be relentless in its pursuit.

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Research

See what works and what doesn’t. Define a single point of customer demographic and pursue its course for a few weeks. When the data points start to match up to the initial beta-launch metrics (bounce, retention, etc), that’s when you’ve figured out a good point of content research. Research can include competition analysis, industry trends, customer behavior analysis, neural data, AI depth range, etc. All data should point towards one direction, which should be the course for your content. It could even be as simple as a popular YouTube channel satisfying an audience’s need.

Planning

Planning is the second most important part of content marketing campaigns. Whether it’s a part of the company’s core goals, or it is synchronous with the audience’s expectations, the planning phase decides the fate of the organisation in totality. Planning a good marketing campaign involves planning a great content marketing campaign. In India, we have huge spaces dedicated to creating content for advertising, print, and digital but only a few laptops and a camera for content marketing. But as time has repeatedly shown us, it is the investment made into the content and dedicated planning made towards its time-frame that decides its success or not.

Production

Now that you know what to write, you must decide how to create it. Whether it is an infographic about travel or a 3000-word blog post on SEO, production decides how shareable a piece of content is going to be. When you know what works in the market, you must outrank it by greater content whether in-terms of value or in terms of design. A balance of the two does the trick, whereas a lack of either demolishes its appeal for a long time. The production phase is one of the more crucial phases of content marketing, which takes care of budgeting, time, quality, etc.

Analytics

This is where you ensure that all tracking mechanisms are in place and all the codes necessary to launch (UTMs, Pixels, etc) have been integrated. Now that you are ready to go live, you must track everything from the ground-up, from the trust level of the author to the comments received per article. Is your content appealing to anybody or somebody? All of this is decided, sometimes within days, as your content dashboard (Adobe, GA, etc) deciphers the mystery of your content.

Promotion

Before the content reaches the hands of the readers, you must create a sizeable audience. Sometimes, this audience reads your content off of SEO or sometimes from social media. Either way, you must have a concrete promotion plan for your subject matter. Capture the attention of experts or make waves into your industry with something revolutionary. Promote your content depending on the scope of the work.

Digital marketing and content marketing have a huge role to play in the promotion of the brand online. There isn’t a brand if there isn’t a community. The brand must work hard, pay its employees well, and produce great content, and at the same time create great results for its shareholders. All of this is accomplished with great content. It is an old 1800s phenomenon. But with everything being online today, it is waiting to reach scale beyond borders.