We’ll define content marketing and its types, explore the content marketing funnel, and look at real-world examples of successful brands using content marketing to grow. You can generate brand awareness by getting your content out there, increasing your brand’s visibility, and building thought leadership in your industry. For example, you could create a guide to camping along the Pacific Crest Trail, which is informative and shareable on social media. Marketing Automation could use a KPI like brand mentions or social shares to measure this.
The beauty of filling your funnel is that as different prospects move through your customer journey, you’ll always have a good piece of content there to nudge them along. Focus your content creation efforts on filling these gaps and ensure that every customer stage/persona combination is catered for with quality content. Now that we know exactly what content marketing is, it’s time to dive into the most shared content formats you’ll encounter.
The content ads feature some of their products as well as details about their free shipping and return policy to drive target audience members to their site . IBM created an infographic when they launched their Cloud marketplace. Their infographic is on-brand, well-organized, and easy to read. It clearly explains what they’re doing with their Cloud marketplace and how customers can benefit from it.
Setting goals for your content marketing is different than setting goals for more traditional marketing tactics like advertising, although some of the KPIs you use may be similar. This goal may require a little more legwork to measure success. The KPIs should include the number of leads you get from each piece of content and your landing page conversion rates. Since this goal is all about getting your brand name out there, measuring brand mentions and social shares is a good way to determine how well your top-of-the-funnel content is working.
It’s why movies are a 50-billion-dollar industry in America alone. It’s also the closest you can get to real contact with someone. Although podcasting is an incredible way to increase intimacy with your audience, nothing does it like video.
Offer to meet with them and discuss their options, free of charge. Aim to help, not to sell, so your prospects feel comfortable disclosing their problems and exploring solutions with you. This can only happen by fostering a genuine connection, which our content marketing framework, They Ask, You Answer, can help you achieve.