Planning content marketing can feel overwhelming. Grab a seat and get ready for the best content marketing guide on the internet.
I don't know about you, but not all marketers are sure of how content marketing increases business revenue.
Some business owners confess they do content marketing because it's the hottest business trend.
If this is you...
Then you don't have to worry...
Because you're in luck today.
This detailed guide will show you how to effectively run content marketing for your business, and make more money from it.
Why content marketing?
Content marketing is value-based marketing where you share educational content with your audience to stay at the top of their minds.
Consumers demand relevant content from businesses these days.
You have to fulfil the demand of customers before promoting your products or services to them.
The content marketing industry generated total revenue of 42.5 billion dollars in 2019 alone.
This is proof that content marketing is a sure bet for generating fat revenues.
Guess what? You've got a higher chance of getting 10× your revenue, provided you follow our tested and proven content marketing guide.
In this guide, you'll learn easy to follow steps for increasing your business revenue with content marketing.
Grab a pen, open a fresh note tab because you're about to change the story of your business for good.
Let’s start with understanding the term "content marketing."
Content marketing is when a brand consistently creates helpful, relevant and engaging content to generate leads, build trust, and convert prospects to customers.
Content may be in different forms, which includes:
You have read, watched or listened to content on the internet before now. If not, this content marketing blog post is a content.
We'll take another example here.
Let's assume you're a blogger looking to monetize your blog by becoming an affiliate marketer. Naturally, your first action is to search for affiliate marketing tips on the internet.
Now, search engines like Google will present the best blog posts on affiliate marketing.
You click to read an affiliate marketing blog post, and submit your email for more helpful content from newsletter updates. The brand continues to share affiliate marketing tricks and tips for a while before they sell you an affiliate marketing course.
This is how content marketing works.
The brand moved you from the top of their sales funnel —awareness— to the continuous interaction stage —email marketing — and the bottom-funnel— buy their course.
The ulterior motive of the brand is to sell their course, but instead of forcing ads on you, they chose to share a free and helpful blog post on affiliate marketing.
Now we can see content marketing strategy is all about giving value before selling.
Is your business value focused? And how are you sharing value to prospects?
You can pen down the answer to these questions before reading on.
Let's see how businesses have used content marketing to exponentially increase their revenue, build a loyal customer base and become the leaders in their industries.
Ever since content marketing became a widely accepted marketing strategy, many businesses fail to do it properly.
The reason for the flunk in some business content marketing strategies is lack of content value.
Here are the best marketing examples to inspire change in your business.
LinkedIn is a social platform focused on connecting people from different businesses to achieve profitable results.
The company was founded by 5 professionals in the year 2002 at Mountain View, California.
Unlike other social platforms prioritising informal social networking, LinkedIn was headstrong on maintaining its brand value as a digital platform for businesses.
This slowed the growth of the company as people weren't used to connecting to other businesses, or searching for jobs online.
They finally resulted in using content marketing strategies to make LinkedIn a value-based app.
In 2005, they added Job listing opportunities for business owners to easily outsource their jobs to professionals. This feature increases the mainstream usage of their platform.
In 2015, LinkedIn acquired Lynda.com to form an open education platform for building the business, creative and technical skills of their users.
LinkedIn now offers 25 different language options and manages a whopping 810 million members worldwide. They generate revenue through talent commissions, marketing, sales and premiums subscriptions.
LinkedIn users grew by leaps and bounds through content marketing.
Evernote is a special note-taking app that helps people easily organize their creative works.
Their initial content marketing strategy was to demonstrate the benefit of using their app compared to other note-taking apps. This strategy wasn't convincing enough for users to adopt their platform.
The company finally resulted in providing more beneficial features like flexible search options and publishing helpful blog posts for people.
Evernote is now the world's leading scheduled & skitching app claiming 8 million users worldwide.
In this evolving world of technology, providing value for clients is the new sales strategy.
The last brand we'll be looking at is the luxurious wristwatch company, Rolex.
Rolex is an exquisite wristwatch brand that offers different watches to its clients.
Innovating consistent content that will stay relevant to their clients was a tough nut to crack for Rolex.
But they're sparking interest in the minds of their audience by providing top quality, and extremely detailed images of their watches.
Let's move further to see the elements of content marketing strategy, stay glued to your device as we unveil the things you need to know about content marketing.
We outlined a simple content marketing process to save you the headache of organizing your content.
The step-by-step content marketing process is.
Let's briefly see what they mean
Research is originally the most essential part of content marketing. Your content is useless if it doesn't resonate with your target audience.
See the different types of research you need before creating any content.
Audience Research: this process involves using social platforms and forums to identify the needs of your audience.
Your target audience is fond of communicating their interests and desires in places like Amazon reviews, YouTube comment sections, Reddit, Quora and Facebook groups.
Don't assume you know what they need, run to these channels and find out for yourself.
Channel Selection: Different groups prefer different meeting channels. Digital marketers love to use LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter the most, while beauty brands prefer visual channels like Pinterest and Instagram.
Find the platforms your audience prefers.
Topic selection: keyword tools and analytics like Answer the Public, Ubersuggest and Google analytics expose the topics your audience cares about the most, and increase your search rank on Google.
Creating written, audio or video content can be daunting for business owners and marketers.
There's no quick trick to content creation, at least valuable content. You should take your time to research your topic properly and outline your structure before creating any content.
In content creation, always remember it's not about the quantity, but the quality of the content you share. Pushing out enormous thin contents won't get you anything but Google penalty.
You could outsource the content creation task to reliable creatives like content writers, copywriters, graphic designers. UI/UX designers and web developers to avoid burn-out.
We offer great content marketing results for our customers, click here to contact us.
In between creating and sharing content, you need to carefully optimize your content for your specific audience.
You need experience in SEO and keyword research here to increase your search rank and get your content seen by your prospects.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO is the process of tweaking your content and web pages to increase your SERP ranking on Google.
Google is by far the biggest search engine with 5.6 billion searches per day.
Keywords are related words or phrases used by your target audience. Optimizing these words and phrases will increase your SERP rank.
After researching, creating and optimizing fresh content, it's time to publish those articles, podcasts and videos.
Never shy away from sharing your content with your audience at any stage of your business. Publishing content consistently builds a loyal audience for your brand and attracts the right people you wish to sell to.
The best channels for sharing fresh content are
The content marketing cycle doesn't end after publishing. Repurposing trending content is another way to increase customer interactions.
Research proves that over 45% of businesses using content marketing don't have a documented content plan, not having a content plan is equivalent to not having a marketing strategy.
You'll have a struggle with maintaining a unified content voice and value across all channels if you don't have a content marketing guideline.
A content marketing guideline is a slide of information describing the goals, tone, values and communication style of a brand.
Don't have a guideline yet?
See what you need for a content marketing guideline here:
A persona is a typical customer, mostly labelled in a fictional character, that needs the service or product of your brand.
Some of us have imaginary friends in our head we talk to, that are similar to a persona. Although, a brand persona is created with a more detailed description.
Why Create a Brand Persona?
The ultimate goal for creating a buyer persona is to maintain a set tone and vision for the brand. Buyers' persona keeps you and your team members focused on a set audience.
What's the motive behind your brand? What problem is your business solving, why should people trust you?
These questions are answered in your brand goals and vision statement.
We've established that your audience has specific content preferences. Spell out the type of content your brand will focus on, and consistently publish content there.
Your entire content marketing plan is the vehicle to building a healthy brand with huge ROI, but your content style guide is the gas needed to move the engine.
A content style guide is a written set of rules that maintains the tone, voice, mode of interaction and restrictions of a brand.
There are millions of businesses creating content on the internet as we speak, 7million blogs are being published on the internet every day, meaning you're not alone in this.
Your content will be lost among the noise if you don't demonstrate a unique brand personality on all your content. Creating a style guide is the easiest way to maintain your brand values.
How do you create a style guide?
Here are the key things to focus on when creating a style guide for your brand.
If you'd like to see more examples of content styles used by popular businesses, click here.
You'll save yourself a lot of stress and unnecessary decisions with a content calendar.
Using a content calendar across your marketing campaigns keeps your activities well-organized and on the right track.
Finally, we've come to the end of this content marketing guide, I bet you now know how to effectively create a content marketing plan.
But we don't want to leave you without talking about the "money."
Remember the main aim for going through the headache of creating consistent, helpful content to clients I'd to make them buy your offer.
It's only fair we show you how to make money with content marketing, right?
Now, assuming you have followed all the steps we laid down for running a successful content marketing campaign. You'll have an enormous amount of loyal prospects consuming your free content.
But, you don't earn a cent from increasing your fan base. Even if you have over 10,000 active readers on your blog.
Does that mean content marketing is a waste of time?
Not, all you need to do is monetize some of the content you create, and persuade those 10,000 active blog readers to buy your stuff.
See the surest ways to make money from content marketing now.
You have all the prospects flocking to your site whenever you publish new content, these loyal customers trust your judgement, and they're willing to break the bank for your cause.
This is the best time to offer advertising opportunities for other businesses—avoid advertising for competitors—offering relevant products and services to your audience for a fee.
Another way to monetize the free contents you share with customers is through affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing is a commission-based marketing strategy where you promote the product or service of a brand through Links and referral codes.
You earn a percentage of every product bought by the lead generated by you.
This is one of the most popular methods for earning money from content marketing in 2022.
This is applicable for brands that offer services on a subscription basis. Free services are called freemiums.
Freemiums is a content marketing format used to attract a wide audience, share value and persuade them to purchase the premium packages.
The Spotify streaming brand is an example of this strategy. They allow new users to use their app for free, but there are a few limitations and plenty of ads. This propels the user to purchase their paid subscription plans to avoid the ads and enjoy the full service.
We want you to consistently share free content to your audience, well, not all of it.
The contents you share should only be a temporary solution to your audience problem, the full package should be locked up in a safe, and the only way to unlock that key is money.
You can choose to promote your offers through sales copies, email marketing and social media paid ads. But you'd need the service of a copywriter here.
Here's a list of offers you could sell to your prospects.
We've finally come to the end of this content marketing guide. You can share this content with your team members and digital marketing friends for free.
Now I'm sure you've learnt how to run successful content marketing campaigns single-handedly or with your team.
Always remember, the extent you go to give value to prospects is how much revenue you'll get from your business. Always focus on offering help, rather than ripping customers money with your product or service.
Bloom digit media is a value-based advertising Agency focused on increasing the revenue of your business by giving value to clients. See more about our services here.