In today’s digital marketing circle, content marketing has attracted so much attention, that it has become the most essential part of any business or organization.

Leading brands and marketers are utilizing content marketing to grow their businesses in all spheres.

A recent study jointly conducted by MarketingProfs^[1] and Content Marketing Institute, and cited in an infographic by Point Visible tells it all.

Please, find the complete Infographic here ~ Impact^[2].

The study found that 62% of B2B marketers and 63% of B2C marketers are “much more” or “somewhat more” successful with content marketing than they were one year ago.

The truth is that more and more businesses are using, planning to invest, or increase their content marketing budget.

To further back this up, Ben Green’s article at Oktopost^[3] shows that 86% of B2B marketers are using content marketing.

While the joint research by Content Marketing Institute^[4] and MarketingProfs shows 89℅ B2B marketers and 86℅ B2C marketers are using content marketing to maximize their businesses.

The study further shows that 55% of marketers plan to increase their content marketing budget in the coming year.

As you can see, over 80℅ of B2B and B2C marketers agreed that content marketing is the most important element to their content marketing campaigns – establishing the fact that content is King.

Hence, to go much further down this article, let’s find out what content marketing is all about?

What Is Content Marketing?

Here’s Marketo’s^[5] description of content marketing:

“Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality, valuable content to attract, inform, and engage an audience, while also promoting the brand itself.”

And here’s how Content Marketing Institute^[6] defined content marketing:

“Content marketing is also defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

These digital marketing giants gave a vivid description of content marketing, pointing to one fact – purpose!

What Is The Purpose Of Content Marketing?

Simply put, to attract and retain readers and prospective customers to your website or business by creating, curating, and publishing high-quality content on a consistent basis.

Now that we know the purpose let find out the components of a content strategy.

Examples Of Content Marketing

There are numerous content marketing examples in the market-place where you can learn from, or get inspired.

Some content marketing examples are:

ProvenSEO

Proven SEO is a digital marketing hub that is connecting marketers, businesses, and organizations with prospective clients.

It is a leading influencer marketing Platform that is connecting quality brands, big & small with top blogs and trusted publishers.

ProvenSEO will help you improve your search rankings, brand awareness, and build online authority.

Coke’s “Share A Coke” Campaign

Coca-cola (Coke) launched a campaign called “Share a Coke.” The exercise offered everybody the prospect to personalize their drink.

The campaign coordinators added 150 popular Australian names to the side of the bottles.

What was the result? The campaign went viral, and every single person or group of people were talking about it.

Do You Know Why The Campaign Was So Successful?

Personalization was the key factor to the campaigns success. The company made every single person feel like a king and queen by using personal names.The point here is for you to get to the heart of your targeted audience and prospective customers. How?

By personalizing your message accordingly. This will make them feel special, and the result will be increased engagement, leads, and more sales.

GoPro

We all know that visual content is an incredible content marketing type that has a powerful force.

These type of content can significantly boost traffic and sales.

GoPro knows how to do it best. Their marketing strategy is nothing but quality visual content. They market their products in a variety of ways.

Most prominent is sponsored events – sports. These activities help GoPro to promote their products to customers and show them how their products work.

Consequently, GoPro has successfully established itself as a visual content marketing superpower.

How Can I Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?

Developing a content marketing strategy for your business is a MUST if you want to succeed in content marketing.

That is why more than 80℅ of B2B and B2C marketers have a content marketing strategy.

Some amazing ways to develop a content marketing strategy are:

Set Priorities

A combined study by “The Content Marketing Institute and The MarketingProfs,” found that creating more engaging content is the top priority for 72℅ of B2B marketers.

What are your marketing priorities, have you identify them?

• Do you want to create more engaging content?
• Do you want to understand what content type works best?
• Do you want to create visual content?

Consequently, try as much to set your marketing priorities, it will help you maintain consistency and maximize your ROI.

Establish Your Content Marketing Goals

Why Is This Important?

Establishing your content goals is the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy.

You need to understand what you want your content to achieve.

The screenshot below by “Content Marketing Institute” shows that the goal of 85℅ B2B marketers is to generate more lead.

So, determining your goals will help you understand how to create a successful content marketing strategy.

Generating Content Ideas

Being able to come up with a regular flow of content ideas has always been a major challenge for many marketers.

To succeed in content marketing, you need to frequently come up with valuable content that are meaningful to your audience.

Here’s what Ronell Smith said in his article on Moz space:

“If you desire to create a brand whose content is sought-after and, indeed, clamored for, you must bake meaning into your content.”

To create meaningful content and maintain consistency, you must have an arsenal of content ideas at your fingertips.

Kissmetrics^[7] offers 101 ways to come up with amazing content ideas.However, there are many tools that can help you as well, such as:

• Quora
• Buzzsumo
• Google Trends
• Answer the Public
• Moz’s Keyword Explorer

What Are The Common Content Marketing Mistakes?

The good thing about mistakes is that it provides you a clear picture of what to avoid in future.

Here are some common mistakes content marketers are making you can avoid.

Publishing Less Content

Many are not getting the benefits of their content campaigns because they’re producing less content.

Marketers who are frequently publishing saw a great increase in web traffic than those who publish less.

For example, research by Hubspot^[8] found that marketers who published more than 16 blog posts per month saw an increase of about 4.5× more leads than those who published between 0 – 4 posts per month.

The study even became more interesting when it found that small companies with 1 – 10 employees that publish over 11 blog posts per month drive much higher traffic.

They saw 3× more traffic increase than companies of the same size that publish less blog posts per month.

NewsCred also saw an incredible boost in traffic of almost 50℅ increase after they increased their publishing frequency from six posts per week to 10 weekly posts.

Pro Tips: Ensure that you consistently create and publish more high-quality content.

Talking too Much About Yourself

The core value of a good content marketer is to position yourself as a credible expert – a solution to the audience.

Your audience needs to know that you’re always there to help them solve their problems.

Ironically, some have chosen to talk about themselves instead of identifying customer issues and address them accordingly.

Your “About Us” page, for example, should be a page that tells visitors to your site that they’ve come to the right place – a place where they can find solutions to their problems.

You can find more common content marketing mistakes here ^[9].

Read More: What is the Link between Influencer and Content Marketing?

In Conclusion

Now you know that content marketing is all about telling a good story and having a consistent strategy for your stories.

Being able to establish and maintain your strategy, priorities, and goals will set you up as an authority content marketer.

Many wonder how they can become a successful content marketer. It doesn’t have to hard or expensive.

Identify the essential elements of content marketing, implement them, and keep testing to find out what works best.