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Content marketing drives valuable search traffic and social engagement. These in turn can increase the number of valuable actions taken by your audience.
To create a successful content marketing campaign, you first need a strategy. This sets out the objectives and scope of your project. It keeps everything on track while providing a roadmap outlining the different aspects of your campaign.
You can use the ‘conversion funnel’ as a guide when planning your content marketing strategy. This enables you to map your content to key decision points in the consumer journey and address their needs. The conversion funnel helps you understand the consumer journey by tracking the different steps a typical consumer would complete on the way to taking a valuable action such as a purchase, sign up, or contact request. Content marketers should use funnel insights and knowledge to drive more valuable customer engagement.
In order to apply funnel techniques to your content strategy:
Where appropriate, marketers can use what's known as ‘hero content’ as part of the funnel. This is high-value content that aims to drive brand awareness. Although it is created less frequently, it can cause a brand’s message to go viral.
Examples of hero content include research studies, high quality infographics, ebooks, and highly unique and desirable audio/video (AV) content such as exclusive videos or podcasts.
There are a lot of moving parts in a content strategy. Clearly, it’s a useful document to create to get buy-in and sign-off from stakeholders. It can also act as a roadmap for the project itself. And it can be referred to when queries arise and can be adapted to suit the changing needs of the campaign and audience, as required.
A content strategy ensures content is developed for purpose by:
Take into account these key considerations, dependencies, and constraints when project managing a content strategy:
It takes time to plan and execute a content marketing strategy effectively. Because there are many moving parts, you’ll need to be flexible and ensure your strategy is agile. It can evolve in response to changing business objectives, KPIs, and performance. More than any other discipline, content and asset production takes time and money. So, in order for the strategy to succeed, you must understand the full requirements to deliver on your plan from the beginning.
A number of tools and tactics can help content marketers to develop a successful content strategy:
Will Francis is a recognised authority in digital and social media, who has worked with some of the world’s most loved brands. He is the host and technical producer of the DMI podcast, Ahead of the Game and a lecturer and subject matter expert with the DMI. He appears in the media and at conferences whilst offering his own expert-led digital marketing courses where he shares his experience gained working within a social network, a global ad agency, and more recently his own digital agency.
Connect with him on Twitter (X) or LinkedIn.
By the end of this topic, you should be able to:
The following pieces of content from the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library have been chosen to offer additional material that you might find interesting or insightful. While relevant to this module, you will not be assessed on this content.
You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library
ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE
This short course covers the principles of content marketing and demonstrates techniques and useful tools that you can use to develop and refine your content marketing strategy.
You will learn how to:
Approximate learning time: 3 hours