Content Marketing Strategy Essentials For Brands

What brands and businesses need to know about content marketing to reach consumers.

Most brands and businesses know content is a key element of a digital marketing strategy, but many fail to define their content strategy and many others struggle to demonstrate the effectiveness of content marketing. Content is a huge opportunity for brands to reach business goals, whether it's creating brand awareness, acquiring new customers, building loyalty with existing customers, or something else. Here is some essential reading that may help boost the ROI of your content creation and marketing efforts.

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Content Marketing Strategy Guide

Why Is Content Marketing Important For Brands & Businesses?

Content Influences Consumer Purchase Decisions

Many consumers rely on blogs for unbiased opinions and expertise when considering purchases, making blogs an influential platform for marketers trying to reach consumers with money to spend.

Stories Enhance The Customer Experience

Stories are a great way to create compelling experiences. Here are five ways stories help brands understand and enhance the customer journey.

Finding & Reaching Your Audience With Content

Audience Research

A great content marketing campaign isn’t about creating something catchy and popular. To really create content that will resonate, brands must gain a detailed understanding of their audiences – their particular needs, touchpoints, and interests.

Personas

Creating marketing personas by just talking to some people about what they expect from your brand won’t give you what you need to best frame your content strategy. You need to uncover what they need from your content pieces.

Content Mapping

The stories you create and share must engage the personas throughout their customer journey. Here are 16 questions that need answers before content mapping begins.

Creating Awareness With Content

Content needs to tell a story and tie back to your brand so consumers can relate the content they read with the products you sell. Here are three inspirational examples of brands that generated serious awareness with their content.

Increase Purchases With Content

Brands are failing to unite their content and ecommerce efforts. Here what brands can do to start boosting conversions and revenue.

Help Your Message Be Heard

How do you get a brand message out so that it is actually heard by consumers?

Why Content Fails To Connect With Consumers

Creating content that people will care about, people will share with their friends, and will attract links from other websites is harder than it looks. Here three reasons why content goes unnoticed, unshared, and unloved.

Content Ideation

Brands like Red Bull, Dove, GoPro, Warby Parker, ESPN, Chipotle and Oreo know these 18 rules about creating great content that engage your target audiences.

The time you spend planning and creating a strategic editorial calendar that meets business goals and adds value for your customers will add depth, value and cohesion to the customer journey and fuel the sales funnel.

Content Formats

Branded Content

Branded film is a largely unexplored medium, with “The Lego Movie” and “Somers Town” presenting rare but notable endeavors. Considering that film is such a powerful medium for storytelling, could brands be doing more with the medium to communicate the stories and values of their brand to consumers?

Brand Publishing

If you want your brand to build deeper relationships with customers, here’s why you should consider taking a journalistic approach to telling stories that will interest your audience.

Facebook

By refocusing your efforts on what consumers want to see and knowing these Facebook content marketing dos and don’ts, you can leverage the social network as another extension to bring your brand and its stories to life.

How-To

Branded how-to videos are one of the most effective ways to engage with your consumers. Video tutorials help customers better understand your products.

Instagram

Instagram provides a powerful platform for brands to entice, engage, and reach consumers – especially for brands with a highly visual, or luxury product. Brands that know these Instagram best practices will have the advantage.

Podcasts

The first season of the “Serial” podcast was a runaway hit. Marketers who tuned in discovered three masterful storytelling practices.

Prankvertising

Brands that want to release videos that are viewed millions of times could do worse than implementing a prank strategy. But simply filming a prank isn’t enough to guarantee millions of viewers.

Social Media

Social media content can be powerful for brands. Check out how the Milwaukee Brewers use social media to keep their fans engaged all year long.

User-Generated Content

Cheap? Effective? Yep. But user-generated content can also create significant struggles for brands.

What can Doritos’ “Crash the Super Bowl” contest teach brands about user-generated content? Here are 10 lessons for brands on harnessing the power of user-generated content.

Are selfies part of your marketing strategy? Old Navy, Dove, Ted Baker, and Dunkin’ Donuts are a few brands using selfies to create emotional and motivational content.

Video

Stories help brands create stronger emotional bonds with consumers. Here’s why video is an outstanding medium for storytelling.

Visuals

The Getty Images and Lean In Collection offers lessons for every brand can approach visual content through content curation, trends, audience research, and storytelling.

Content Creation

Shareability Is Critical

With so much content vying for the attention of consumers, it’s essential that brands create content that has a high probability of being shared.

Creating Authentic Content

Creating authentic content is hard for brands, but brand advocates or influencers can help win consumer trust and help push people to purchase.

Content Repurposing

Marketers invest so much time and energy into producing high quality, memorable content it would be a shame to waste those efforts on a one-hit wonder. Lowe’s is one brand that has nailed content repurposing.

Content Promotion

Amplifying Video Content With Social Media

People are drawn to online video and web series because they can interact with the creators in ways that they can’t on television. Here’s what brands need to do to optimize the social amplification of video content.

Content Marketing ROI: Measuring & Analyzing

Measuring Content Marketing Success

The demand to show the ROI of content marketing is increasing, but measuring the ROI of content marketing may not be as difficult as you think.

Analyzing Content With Scorecards

Understand the value of your content to the brand and the value to the customer is imperative. One of the best, most relevant ways to analyze past, present, and potential future performance of content is with Content Scorecards.