Content Marketing. Some how, along the way, people have made that and blogging synonymous. This is not the case. Content is any piece of writing, video, paper, speech, talk, whatever, that you produce. Content Marketing is leveraging that content to produce results in your business. This can range anywhere from butts in seats to newsletter sign ups.
This will outline what you need to consider when using content marketing effectively in your business and what your steps should be.
With that in mind. The first step in content marketing is:
WHY?
Why are you doing this and what results do you want to see? Look, if you don't know the answer to this then you won't have a successful content marketing effort (because ultimately you haven't defined what success is). If you feel overwhelmed about making decisions, work backwards.
When you work backwards you start with the end goal. Let's say you want to increase store traffic for a slow day, which is Tuesday. First you want to determine how much do you want to increase traffic by. 10%? 15%? 20%? Then decide what your deadline is and start incrementally working backwards creating milestones. When you execute your plan these milestones will let you know if you are on track to reach your goal.
Second, you look at all the ways and reasons people decide to walk into your store. If you are a clothing boutique you might look at the season changes, prom and formals, or sales you might be having. You might create events such as an in-store shopping experience to drive traffic or an online fashion show. Pick a couple of ways and use these to achieve each milestone, measuring the effectiveness of each.
When you're creating your content you will want to consider this. Look at what content can you create to have people take those actions. Should you do videos, webinars, ebooks, memes? What will have people take the action that will help you reach your milestone. Also, where should you post this content? Where will it have the biggest reach for your audience. And finally, can you repurpose content you have already created? I've included a handy dandy graphic to get you started about how you can repurpose your content.
This was a quick and dirty guide. But really that's all you need. Create your milestones, create the actions, and refine through execution. Keep the target audience in mind when creating your content. If you don't have a focus on who your writing for, than you won't deliver content that will attract people to your blog.
