Many people write about content marketing, but few know how to work with it. There is a lot of noise around, and too little real advice.
It's time to fix this.
We have translated the content marketing guide from Moz for you . This is a series of nine comprehensive articles: from basic principles and strategy to analytics. No fluff. No garbage. Only selected knowledge. These articles are for those who are ready to take content marketing seriously.
Important disclaimer: below is not a literal or exact translation. We adapt list of japan cell phone numbers each article: dry the lyrics, remove the fluff, leave the essence. Where possible, we provide our own examples. If you have any additions, write.
What awaits you:
Part 1: What is Content Marketing? Is it Right for You?
Part 2. Content Strategy
Content Strategy Template
Part 3. Content Marketing Sales Funnel
Part 4. Team selection. Tools
Part 5. Idea Factory: Where to Get Topics and How to Develop Them: Part 1 and Part 2 .
Part 6. Content creation
Part 7. Promotion
Part 8. Analytics and reports
Part 9. Scaling and Growth
Let's start with the first chapter. The rest are available via links.
What is content marketing
It's content, content, and more content. Working with content. And only then with SEO and SMM.
Without content, SEO specialists will have nothing to optimize. How does SEO work? There is a visible part of the page — a video, an article, a photo — this is content. And there is a hidden part — metadata that helps search engines index the page. Each link in the text, each keyword is a small hint that paves the way for people to your content.
Newsletters and tweets, lengthy landing pages and short product descriptions in online stores are all parts of content. The best definition of content was given by Ian Lurie, CEO of the marketing agency Portent:
Content is not infographics, not huge articles, not videos. It is not the materials we create to get to the top of search engines. No.
Content is any message addressed to your audience. Any.
— Ian Lurie, CEO of Portent
And content marketing is work with content (any!) that will help you achieve your goals. And everyone has different goals. Some strive to increase brand awareness, while others want to demonstrate their expertise. Some attract new clients, while others think about how to retain old ones. There are dozens of possible goals. And most of them can be solved with quality content.
We'll talk about how to create it later.
What Content Marketing Gives to Business
Content marketing is in fashion. Despite this, many are hesitant to use it - the advantages are too unclear and the prospects are too vague. Of course, you want your company to be appreciated by customers, but how can you achieve this? The goal seems abstract, but how can you achieve real results? Let's figure it out.
Quality indicators
Brand recognition
Let's imagine the following dialogue:
Source
You've created content — and people already have something to talk about. They discuss not only the content, but also the company that created it. They exchange links, share impressions, and in the process form an opinion about the company. Word of mouth is a gold mine.
Reputation and trust
"I've heard about all sorts of productivity hacks, but I was skeptical. But today I saw an article on this topic in Harvard Business Review and thought: maybe there is a grain of truth in this. After all, a serious magazine wrote about it."
Gaining trust is not an easy task. It takes time. But once you prove your competence, people will start contacting you more often. People trust experts. Become one: content marketing helps you earn a reputation as an expert. The main thing is to focus on quality, not quantity: one strong post a week is better than seven weak ones.
There are plenty of sites that generate tons of content without caring about quality. Don't be like them. Don't make your readers dig through a dump of unfiltered texts and fish out dubious information. People need someone they can trust. And that should be you.
Trust is the ladder that leads from content to your services.
Indirect conversion
"Oh, cool post. Never heard of this company. Yeah, they make software, let's see..."
Competent content marketing helps attract the target audience and reduces the distance between people and your products. If the articles are interesting, the reader will be interested in your services. The main thing is to focus on the right reader, the one you need. Otherwise, you can run into the same rake as Megaplan.
The Megaplan newsletter was launched in the fall of 2012. In a year and a half, it gained 100,000 subscribers . It is a wonderful example of content marketing: high-quality and truly useful articles — and no advertising. However, the newsletter had no commercial potential. According to Maxim Ilyakhov, its former editor, it was a planned unprofitable project . And Megaplan CEO Mikhail Smolyanov said that 100,000 subscribers are “ great, but not enough . ”
Megaplan's mailing list became popular, but it was aimed at the wrong audience. If the first letters - about management, sales, business - were addressed to entrepreneurs, then the subsequent ones - about psychology, thinking, personal effectiveness - were addressed to hired workers. And hired workers are not the audience that will implement a corporate business management system.
