Content marketing is a profession. It’s also a multi-level skill that marketers and content creators adopt to add value. Here is what the content marketer (or the content marketing team) does:
- Research your customer pain points and the search terms they use to find their answers. Customer interviews are the best way to do this, but I suspect that only extroverts like to do that. Fortunately for the introverts, customer pain points are included in articles all over the web, and you can use keyword tools to say on top of search terms.
- Make a list of the top pain points and the most popular related searches.
- Now comes the fun if overwhelming part: plan your content to match your pain point solutions and your customer keywords. First, know what you got. Search your site manually or with automated tools to retrieve your existing content. And don’t forget those annoying hard drives. You’ve probably started and stopped a dozen pieces of content, and so has your team. Find them. A lot of it is still usable.
- Create and leverage content, pulling the text into different formats. A white paper or e-book become slides, infographics, and blogs. It can also go the other way around. Put together related information from several different formats into a longer form. Voila: you’ve created valuable new content.
- Make sure you’re staying on track. Use an editorial calendar, and don’t fool yourself into thinking that you’re automatically going to remember all this new content and you don’t have to track it. That is wrong. Curate your content by recording its URL, topic, sale stage, and a date for refreshing or retiring.
- Use Google analytics and or other metrics to judge customer access and sharing. Adjust your content accordingly. Very few pieces of content go viral. But the only thing you need is for enough qualified customers to see it and make contact.
- Remember that editorial calendar? Keep it current. You will not always be as busy creating content as you are at first. But periodically refresh and create quality content, the search engines love that.