Content Marketing Strategy Essentials For Brands

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

Danny Goodwin By Danny Goodwin from Momentology. Join the discussion » 0 comments

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?

Danny Goodwin

Written by Danny Goodwin

Managing Editor, Momentology

Danny Goodwin is the former Managing Editor of Momentology. Previously, he was the editor of Search Engine Watch, where he was in charge of editing, content strategy, and writing about search industry news.

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