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

Momen­tol­ogy’s free Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Guide explains every­thing you need to know to devel­op or enhance a con­sumer-cen­tric con­tent strat­e­gy. It will help you think about ways to reach, engage, and per­suade con­sumers at key moments.

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? LinkedIn shares three secrets of con­tent mar­ket­ing suc­cess.

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.

Engaging Content: Lessons From The White House

In order to cre­ate an engag­ing dig­i­tal expe­ri­ence to accom­pa­ny Pres­i­dent Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address, the White House’s dig­i­tal media team end­ed up dri­ving 75,000 engage­ments in 61 min­utes. Here’s how they did it and what brands can learn from it.

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.

Movie Tie-Ins

See how brands such as Audi, Tro­jan, Durex, Wal­mart, Ver­mont Ted­dy Bear, Clorox, and even Sponge­Bob cre­at­ed buzz with “Fifty Shades of Grey” con­tent.

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.

More Content Marketing Tips & Tools

Content Marketing Tips

A help­ful col­lec­tion of 14 con­tent mar­ket­ing tips from experts on cre­at­ing rel­e­vant con­tent for your audi­ence, mak­ing blog con­tent a lit­tle sex­i­er, show­ing some per­son­al­i­ty, where to get con­tent ideas, and much more.

Tools That Will Make Your Life Easier

These 18 con­tent mar­ket­ing tools can help you opti­mize the process and aid in ideation, cre­ation, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and pro­mo­tion.

What do you think are the keys to a suc­cess­ful con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy?