Content marketing

Content marketing is a type of marketing where brands plan, create, promote and analyze content to meet strategic goals. Brands use content to attract, engage and interest users through various forms of content, from long-form guides to short videos.

By creating a content marketing strategy, brands are able to track content offers for lead generation, measure engagement of social media posts and more.

How to Optimize Content Marketing

Follow these simple steps to learn how to optimize content marketing efforts:

Form Audience Personas

Content marketing usually revolves around a target audience. As a comprehensive profile of your ideal audience, personas describe the characteristics of the consumers or businesses you are trying to target.

Perform market research and interviews of current and prospective customers to create a profile that lists target demographics, job titles, incomes/budgets, industries and more. With a persona, tailor your content to speak to your audience, address their pain points and position yourself as the solution.

Perform Keyword Research & Competitive Analysis

Use analytics tools to research the best keywords and topics to use for content marketing. Find out the monthly search volume and competitiveness of these search phrases. The topics should relate to your products, services, industry or audience interests.

Additionally, check out how your competition is doing with keyword rankings and content creation and performance. You need ideas of how to improve your own content to be better than your competitors.

twitter competitive analysis report from sprout

Plan Content Around Business Goals

Your business goals, such as raising awareness or generating more leads, are crucial to develop your content marketing plan. The types of content you use to execute your plan will depend on these goals.

For example, if your goal is to increase leads per month, your strategy could be to create a white paper that describes best practices in your industry and contains the topics and keywords from your previous analysis and research. Then you would create several pieces of content to support and promote this resource, including a landing page with a form and emails with links to the white paper page.

The landing page could offer the content piece as a free download, using a call to action, in exchange for lead information filled out on the form. As a result, your content choice was a big factor in meeting your original goal of generating more leads.

Analyze Content Marketing Data

After carefully crafting your content and distributing through your marketing channels, analyze key performance indicators associated with site performance, search engine optimization, social media and other sources of traffic. Use this data to learn from mistakes and invest in content that drives traffic and revenue.