Content Marketing:

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing

valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and,
ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for enterprises that use content
marketing:

 Increased sales
 Cost savings
 Better customers who have more loyalty

Eight steps to effective content marketing strategy:

Step 1: Define Your Objectives And KPIs. ...

Step 2: Define Audience And Channels. ...
Step 3: Map To Sales Funnel. ...
Step 4: Determine Your Digital Channel Strategy. ...
Step 5: Identify Market Opportunity. ...
Step 6: Evaluate Existing Resources And Processes. ...
Step 7: Create Your Content Marketing Plan. ...
Step 8: Test, Evaluate And Optimize.

Step 1: Define Your Objectives And KPIs

Without clear goals and metrics to measure success, you cannot fully evaluate and improve your
content marketing efforts over time.

Leading marketing organizations go beyond vanity metrics such as likes and standard metrics
like leads and sales, they look at metrics that measure how their marketing efforts are developing
deeper relationships with customers and impacting overall business objectives, such as cost
savings, productivity improvement and risk management.

Step 2: Define Audience And Channels

The rise of social media has made consumers more segmented across the web, with their
attention split across multiple channels that fit their media preferences and needs.
To be able to capture and earn consumer attention, you need to find out where your target
audience is spending their time. And since each platform serves a unique audience base, you also
need to identify the content that caters to that specific group.

Step 3: Map To Sales Funnel

Now that you have your consumers’ pain points, motivation drivers and triggers identified, the
next step is to map them to each stage of the buyer journey against the sales funnel. Here’s an
example from Contently below:

Step 4: Determine Your Digital Channel Strategy

With an ever-growing number of social media channels and platforms, you want to find out
where your target consumers already spend time to research and find information related to your
product and industry.
Once you have your list, narrow down to ones that are high traffic, popular sites where you think
prospects may be receptive to your brand message. You will also want to use web analytics to
find out which sources and channels your audience comes from, and identify the content formats
that resonate with the audience for each channel.

As well, find out where your prospects and competitors share content through traffic and referral
data sites like Alexa as well as content marketing tools like BuzzSumo.

Step 5: Identify Market Opportunity

Now that you have developed your channel strategy, what content should you create for these
platforms? To identify your content marketing opportunities, you want to find out what your
competitors are publishing and not publishing – the latter would be opportunities for you to
leverage and stand out from your competition.

Look at which customer pain points you can help solve through your content. Then develop your
own unique voice and perspective that you want your brand to be identified with. Seek to add
original insights and value to your readers.

Step 6: Evaluate Existing Resources And Processes

Your content marketing efforts won’t be successful if you don’t have the appropriate resources
and processes to support them.

Marketers must not only evaluate their existing budget, content, technology and headcount, but
to also conduct an ―honest assessment of how all of an organization’s content resources fit
together, and where additional talent, technology and processes are needed.‖

Below is a list of questions to support you with this evaluation process.

Step 7: Create Your Content Marketing Plan

Now that you’re ready to start developing your content plan, here’s what your plan should
include:
 Input from Step #1-6: your content objectives, KPIs, audience definition, channels strategy,
market opportunity, resources and processes
 Content to create
 Channels through which you will engage your audience with your content
 Contributors who will create content
 Workflow to create, produce, approve and publish content

With the content that will be created, you want to include your content topics, categories and
subcategories, formats, frequency, production budget and share of overall content production.
Here’s a sample template from Contently:
You’ll also want to turn this into an editorial calendar so you can visually see how all your
content pieces map out.

The next step is to strategize how content will be distributed through various channels, both
owned and paid platforms. You will also want to outline how all internal teams can leverage the
content that will be created, to identify collaboration opportunities and to also highlight how
your content adds value to your organization.
Here’s an example of what this may look like (excluding internal teams):

To help you stay on top of all your content contributors, topics, formats and budget, you’ll want
to document all these items down so you can track everything.
And finally, here’s a template example from Contently on how you could outline the workflow
and process through which content is created, produced, approved and published.

Step 8: Test, Evaluate And Optimize

Developing and executing your content plan is half the battle, you’ll also need to evaluate and
optimize your strategy to continue improving your content marketing programs.
To do so, you want to evaluate the performance of your content based on each topic or format,
the channels that engage your audience most deeply, and the content contributors who deliver the
strongest results against your KPIs.

When you track this data on an ongoing basis, you’ll be able to identify which types of content
are working (or not working), which channels drive the greatest ROI to prioritize for future
content distribution, and which contributors to recognize and reward or require further coaching
and support to deliver content that will best engage your audience.

By repeating this process regularly, you can truly create, execute and optimize your content
marketing programs for success, delivering compelling content that reaches, engages and
converts your target consumers.

Steps to Creating Your Own Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Step 1: Identifying Your Mission, Purpose and Goals. ...
Step 2: Understand Your Audience. ...
Step 3: Establish Your Content Priorities. ...
Step 4: Plan Your Strategy. ...
Step 5: Create Your Content. ...
Step 6: Promote Your Content.

Tools used in content marketing:

Story Telling:

Storytelling is an age-old medium for transferring knowledge. Most stories we heard when we
were young were passed down from our parents' parents and from one generation to the
next. Storytelling is a powerful communication tool that has been used to impart valuable life
lessons.

Another gripping story that made waves, both in its print version and on screen, was John
Grisham’s "A Time to Kill." In this novel, a father is shot in cold blood by his daughters'
attackers and, in a twist of fate, he asks the defense lawyer to defend him. This is a book that
challenges cultural norms and highlights social injustice and economic inequality. It was such a
powerful book that it was turned into a film.
Storytelling in Marketing

Marketers are exploiting the potential of storytelling in spearheading brand awareness

campaigns. Today, storytelling has become a content marketing trend adopted by both B2B and
B2C marketers to engage prospective consumers and build a strong relationship with them.

The flexibility of storytelling makes it an indispensable marketing tool for businesses of all sizes
since there are various ways to tell a story. Writers can blog about a particular brand story; visual
brands can use Instagram, Pinterest or Tumblr to tell stories that appeal to their consumers;
companies can create webinars and videos about brands, products and services, which are very
effective.

Take this infomercial from Lifebuoy: LifeBouy Helped A Child Reach 5. The company could
have simply sold its product, but instead, it showed how it can change someone's life. It appeals
to the weakness of the consumer while highlighting the benefits of the product to create a
compelling story of a child who limits his chances of contracting diarrhea--a life threatening
disease in India--by being shown how to wash his hands properly. This infomercial allowed
Lifebuoy to stand out from its competitors.

Storytelling as a Marketing Strategy

Storytelling is the new mode of advertising brand campaigns. This is one powerful form of visual
content marketing that every marketer should learn how to leverage online. The evolution of
digital content is so inspiring and innovative. Product commercials today are no longer about
product features, but more about the consumer experience.

Storytelling is a content marketing strategy that any brand, company, product or service can
greatly benefit from. People remember stories. If you put a story capable of evoking emotions in
your viewers, they will never forget the experience.

Personal Branding:
Personal branding is the practice of marketing people and their careers as brands.

It is an ongoing process of developing and maintaining a reputation and impression of an

individual, group, or organization.

Whereas some self-help practices focus on self-improvement, personal branding defines success
as a form of self-packaging.

Your personal brand is how you promote yourself.

It is the unique combination of skills, experience, and personality that you want your followers to
see.

It is the telling of your story, and the impression people gain from your online reputation.

Gamification:
Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game
contexts. It can also be defined as a set of activities and processes to solve problems by using or
applying the characteristics of game elements.

Games and game-like elements have been used to Educate, Entertain and Engage for thousands
of years. Some classic game elements are; Points, Badges, and Leaderboards.

Points are used as visual identifiers of progress in sports, reward cards and video games

Badges display achievement, whether from service in the military or a gold star on school report
card

Leaderboards are used across sports, sales teams, and in general life to present competitive
placement

Gamification is the strategy for influencing and motivating the behavior of people, which also
includes employees. Gamification can be applied across a broad spectrum of situations where
individuals need to be motivated to pursue specific actions or activities. Gamification in the
workplace can increase employee engagement to drive the company’s performance.

Game mechanics make an employee’s job more transparent by making goals clear and easy to
follow. An employee is able to see progress on performance, receive immediate feedback on
accomplishments and connect with co-workers through collaboration and competition.

An example of a gamification strategy for internal employees may focus on the goal to increase
engagement and retention. Gamification provides a sustainable foundation for employee
engagement by appealing to powerful intrinsic motivators that all humans share, including
autonomy, mastery, purpose and social interaction. Measurable results are a key benefit to
gamification in the workplace.

Some top gamification best practices include:

1. Determine how compelling your content is.

Take an honest look at your content and platforms to make sure they are ideal for
gamification. Gamification cannot make an inferior user experience successful, but works
best when turning an exciting, attractive experience into a richer, more participatory one.
2. Establish a timeframe.
Gamification is a long-term strategy, not a launch and leave it alone one. It’s critical to
plan the ideal timeframe so users can build their experience over time.
3. Figure out the time to market.
Gamification must be approached strategically and not rushed. Determine how soon you
need to gamify your site or application and what level of effort will be required to do so.
4. Measure results.
It’s important to have a clear sense of what your business goals are and how you go about
determining them. Is your gamification successful? What are the results? How can you
improve?