Content marketing is about writing quality engaging content to promote your products/services to key influencers and decision makers. Marketing your services via the content you create gives you the opportunity to help prospects rather than overtly sell to them
Step 1 – Generate Content
Content can be generated in multiple forms. Based on the objective it is expected to accomplish, the tone and the language can be accordingly adjusted. Some of the common forms, which content takes include:
- White paper
- Blog
- Webinar
- Article posting
- Press Release
Step 2 – Propagate Content
Having generated the content, make sure that you get it across to your intended target audience. Generating content and making no noise about it does not make any sense. At this stage, it is also important to create a mechanism to track conversions. Some of the common mechanisms, that you can use to propagate content include:
- Email Newsletters/ Email Campaigns
- Webcasts
- Social media share
- Banner ads at affiliate/partner sites
- SEM campaigns
Step 3 – Track conversions
While you propagate the content, you need to have mechanisms in place to track conversions. These include things like design of separate landing pages at your website, innovative CTA (Call to Action), database columns to capture registrations etc.
At an elementary level, it is possible to do this manually, however, do invest in a little bit of automation, so that it does not become an overhead to keep doing this for every campaign that you run.
Step 4 –Initiate customer touch points
Marketing is great; no large deal is ever closed without personal touch. Make sure that you engage with a qualified prospect. This could be over the phone, through personal meeting. Make sure that you equip your inside sales or the sales teams with the right knowledge about the prospect, based on his past interactions with your website. Knowledge of what the prospect is interested in can help a lot in focusing on the right areas during a sales interaction.
Step 5 – Analyze and improve
Based on the campaigns that you run and the metrics that you generate for it, analyze what is working and what is not. Define improvement areas and include the corrections in the campaigns that you plan to launch.
There is no universal ‘great’ campaign. It is highly contextual and there is always scope for improvement.
Regards,
Atul