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.
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 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?