Content Marketing

Question 1

What is Content Marketing?

Answer 1

Content marketing is an opportunity for organisations to create the type of content that people want. Content marketing drives valuable search traffic and email and social media engagement to increase the number of valuable actions taken by your target audience. It begins a relationship, a familiarity and trust as you repeatedly show up when people search online for information or just to be entertained.

Question 2

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Answer 2

1) Grow awareness of your brand or business.
2) Recruit advocates of your brand.
3) Increase and improve search engine rankings, or SEO.
4) Generate new business leads, nurture sales prospects, and
convert customers.
5) Enhance understanding of your business proposition.

Question 3

How can you ensure your content intent aligns with the Awareness stage of the sales funnel?

Answer 3

Let potential customers know why you exist, what you stand for, and your unique selling points compared to competitors. Tell them what you do, how you do it, and how you can solve a problem for your customers.

Question 4

How can you ensure your content intent aligns with the Interest stage of the sales funnel?

Answer 4

This is where potential customers are doing a little bit more digging around about what you do, what your business proposition is, and what it is that you can offer. Capture the audience’s attention beyond awareness and convince them of your proposition.

Question 5

How can you ensure your content intent aligns with the Consideration stage of the sales funnel?

Answer 5

Give further detail on what you do to inform customers about your expertise, price, and other happy customers. Show why customers should choose you over your competitors – demonstrate your experience, customer testimonials, and expert knowledge.

Question 6

How can you ensure your content intent aligns with the Conversion stage of the sales funnel?

Answer 6

Foster an enticing and personalised experience between your customers and your business. This includes lead nurturing, adding value, managing customer expectations, clear terms of service, requesting feedback, and community management.

Question 7

How can you ensure your content intent aligns with the Retention stage of the sales funnel?

Answer 7

Encourage repeat business but also highlight positive customer experiences for new potential customers. This involves celebrating champion customers and showcasing user generated content (UGC) through your content marketing channels.

Question 8

What are some qualities of highly effective content?

Answer 8

1) Relevant
2) Personalized
3) Valuable
4) Addresses needs
5) Includes a CTA
6) Presents solution

Question 9

What content format is ideal for the Awareness stage of the buyers journey?

Answer 9

Exciting pieces of imagery
Short-form video
Social ads
GIFs
Advertorials
Templates
Banner ads.

Question 10

What content format is ideal for the Interest stage of the buyers journey?

Answer 10

Blogs
Long-form videos
White papers
Podcasts
E-books
Infographics

Question 11

What content format is ideal for the Consideration stage of the buyers journey?

Answer 11

Carousels
Case studies
Webinars
FAQs
Testimonials
Newsletters
Facebook Messenger
Social display advertising

Question 12

What content format is ideal for the Conversion stage of the buyers journey?

Answer 12

Re-targeting
Imagery
Carousels
Social display
Canvas
Cards

Question 13

What content format is ideal for the Retention stage of the buyers journey?

Answer 13

You can also utilize Click to Buy formats and other exclusive offers for people who’ve previously bought. You might also want to use imagery, rewards, reviews, value additions, and discounts.

Question 14

What are the 2 two broad categories of content?

Answer 14

Topical content
Evergreen content

Question 15

What is Topical Content?

Answer 15

Topical content is newsworthy, time-sensitive content that is linked to a topic and is best suited to a particular moment in time.

Question 16

What are some examples of Topical Content?

Answer 16

1) Short written pieces
2) Tweets and social media posts
3) Memes, videos, and images

Question 17

What is Evergreen Content?

Answer 17

Evergreen content is content that can be used at various stages of the buyer’s journey. It has has a longer lifespan and is generally of high value, allowing you to drive conversions and brand affinity over a longer period. It can be repurposed into different formats, maximizing your content creation time and efforts.

Question 18

What are some examples of Evergreen Content?

Answer 18

1) ‘how-to’ articles
2) video tutorials
3) beginner’s guides
4) FAQs
5) case studies
6) list articles
7) checklists

Question 19

What is a content marketing strategy?

Answer 19

A content marketing strategy is an ever-evolving plan that outlines your content marketing goals and target audience.

Question 20

What should a content marketing strategy do?

Answer 20

• It determines the content needs of your target audience.
• It defines their user journey, content formats, and content
  styling.
• It aligns to business objectives, and it is fully integrated with
  the wider business.
• It is ‘ever-evolving’ and should always be tweaked and
  modified to adapt to changes in the market and how people
  are consuming your content.
• It sets out the objectives and scope of your project. Your
  strategy will help you to keep everything on track while
  providing a roadmap for execution of the different aspects in
  the strategy.

Question 21

What should you aim for as content goals for your content marketing?

Answer 21

1) Awareness
2) Consideration
3) Conversion
4) Affinity
5) Advocacy

Question 22

What is Awareness goal-focused Content?

Answer 22

This focuses on content such as social media posts, banner ads, videos, and images that let people know about your brand, promotions, products, or services by driving visibility with your target audience.

Question 23

How can you measure the effectiveness of awareness goal-focused content?

Answer 23

Effectiveness of awareness content is largely measured in impressions, number of people reached, and number of searches for your brand online.

Question 24

What is Consideration goal-focused Content?

Answer 24

This involves content such as blogs, demonstration videos or specifications that outline product benefits and features. Product specifications help your audience to make up their mind and choose your product when they are looking to buy, engage in a sales conversation or take another action.

Question 25

How can you measure the effectiveness of Consideration goal-focused content?

Answer 25

Consideration content can be measured by looking at the number and quality of comments, shares, likes, and replies – in other words, anything that elicits a response from your target audience.

Question 26

What is Conversion goal-focused Content?

Answer 26

The focus here is on content such as digital advertising, lead magnets, and purchase landing pages that drive users towards ecommerce or lead generation areas of your website or business. The purpose of this content is to build on the effectiveness of your awareness and consideration content, and get the valuable action over the line. In many cases, it is the last point before a potential customer makes an eCommerce purchase or completes a lead generation form.

Question 27

How can you measure the effectiveness of Conversion goal-focused content?

Answer 27

Conversion content can be measured by tracking the number of sales or leads that you receive via this conversion content.

Question 28

What is a lead magnet?

Answer 28

A lead magnet is when a person enters their contact details into a web form on a website in return for something from the company. Examples of lead magnets include eBooks, free trials of a product, access to a webinar, podcast, or video content. When a company is giving away valuable content for free, people will give their contact details in return for access to these pieces of content.

Question 29

What is Affinity goal-focused Content?

Answer 29

Affinity goal-focused content can include all content types and is associated with brand building and driving positive affinity and connections to attract new customers, or retain existing customers.

Question 30

How can you measure the effectiveness of Affinity goal-focused content?

Answer 30

Affinity content can be measured by ranking social media engagement through reactions, comments, and feedback signals in terms of positive or negative sentiment towards your brand or organization.

Question 31

What is Advocacy goal-focused Content?

Answer 31

Advocacy goals are a continuation of affinity goals and affect all content types associated with retaining existing customers. When people have a positive affinity towards your brand or company, not only can you retain them as customers, but they may also go on to be your brand champions or advocates and recommend you to their contacts.

Question 32

How can you measure the effectiveness of Advocacy goal-focused content?

Answer 32

Advocacy is determined by measuring ongoing positive engagement, user generated content, reviews, ratings, and recommendations. In many cases, customers will create content on your behalf, like an unboxing video or a testimonial, as well as social media shares and comments that include
their own personal endorsement.

Question 33

What are some key consideration when aligning your content marketing goals to your overall business goal?

Answer 33

• Consistency: Ensure that there is a high level of consistency in
  language, appearance, and messaging across all of your
  content, in line with other marketing materials.
• Timing: Consider how your content marketing activities can
  help support other campaigns the business is running.
  Input: Get buy-in and encourage input and ideas from the
  wider business including PR,
• Communications, HR, Legal, Product, and Finance.
• Website: Assess how content marketing impacts your website
  content, structure, SEO goals, and ecommerce conversions
  and whether there are any improvements to be made.

Question 34

What are Buyer Personas?

Answer 34

Buyer personas help you understand your customers and prospective customers better. A buyer persona is an imaginary character based on research and data that represents your ideal buyer or target audience.

Question 35

What is the purpose of a buyer persona?

Answer 35

1) Targeting - Targeting helps to position your products as
relevant and worthy of consideration
2) Format - Looking at the individual creative and digital
formats that your target audience consumes.
3) Discovery - Discovering the channels your audiences are
inhabiting allows you to get a grasp of your audience’s
channel behavior. Where are they having conversations?

Question 36

What are some key considerations when developing a buyer persona?

Answer 36

1) Objectives: What are they looking to achieve by interacting
with your business?
2) Location: Where are they from? Where are they based?
3) Demographic: How old are they? What is their gender?
4) Job details: What is their economic position or job role?
5) Platforms: What are their main sources of information?
Which resources do they consult when making decisions?
How influential are each of these?
6) Devices: What are they using to access the internet?
7) Purchase behaviors: What is their path to purchase?
8) Interests: What issues are they trying to solve? How do these
issues impact on their lives? What are the benefits of solving
these challenges?

Question 37

What are the best practices steps for using buyer personas in your content strategy

Answer 37

1) Prioritize your personas in terms of:
- how easy it is to reach them online
- their value to your business or objective
2) Use your reach/value prioritization to help set budgets for
production and allocate resources.
3) Develop creative messaging and creative assets that align to
buyer needs, solve their problems, and showcase your
business in a useful, authentic way.
4) Choose to distribute the content on the channels and
devices buyers use and align your content production
outputs to the requirement of these channels.
5) Create the types of content they need at key stages of their
purchase journey.
6) Manage internal expectations and set KPIs and timelines for
engagement or conversion outcomes by understanding the
typical purchase or conversion journey and frequency as
detailed in your persona research.

Question 38

What are the six key steps for creating a content campaign?

Answer 38

1) Use social listening and competitor research to unearth
popular content topics. 2. Do keyword research to discover
what are people searching for online.
3) Write a creative brief to help guide and brainstorm ideas.
4) Review and agree on content themes and topics for
production.
5) Share on website, social media, and email.
6) Review engagement metrics and try to improve
performance.

Question 39

What is Social Listening?

Answer 39

Social listening is the process of conducting research into what people think or feel about a brand, product, or topic. It often forms the basis of a content strategy, which will respond to those findings – either by creating content that answers the questions discovered in your research, or addressing
undesirable ways that people consider your brand or product.

Question 40

What is Social monitoring?

Answer 40

Social monitoring is the ongoing method of tracking online conversations in real- time, to pick up mentions and conversation related to your business in a timely manner that gives you the opportunity to react accordingly.

Question 41

What are the benefits of Social monitoring?

Answer 41

1) Identify talking points: It enables you to identify what people
are talking about in relation to your organization or brand.
2) Spot potential risks: It helps you to spot potential risks in
relation to emerging competitors, threats, and negative
customer feedback before they become a serious issue.
3) Understand brand sentiment: It helps you to understand
your brand sentiment, business position in the market, and
how your brand is perceived.

Question 42

What are the benefits of Competitor monitoring?

Answer 42

1) Define the content that works well for your competitors’
audience and see how it compares to your content, can you
see what’s working for them and can you do it better?
2) Spot content gaps by looking at successful competitor
content that you don’t currently
3) Identify innovation in platform usage by looking at new
channels and content types they are using.
4) Avoid clash of content or ideas by keeping your content
unique to your brand or organization.

Question 43

What is keyword research?

Answer 43

Keyword research helps guide your content development. Content marketers can look at the things that people are searching for and the questions that they ask Google. You can then create the content for your website that people are actively looking for, so when they search, your website shows up.

Question 44

What is a creative brief?

Answer 44

A creative brief allows you to identify the most important insights and understandings that will inform your creative outputs, be they blog posts, e-books, or Instagram stories. You can get insights for your content from the different types of research that you’ve been doing for your strategy on personas, competitors, and the general industry landscape and keywords.

Writing a creative brief will challenge you to distill your insights into a document of usable actions that your creative and content teams can follow. It will act as a set of clear instructions for content development to work towards your objectives.

Question 45

What are the benefits of a creative brief?

Answer 45

1) Developing a better understanding of your audience, goals,
and campaign idea
2) Teasing out the nuances of the campaign
3) Developing consistent engaging messaging across all
channels and formats
4) Using time with writers and designers more efficiently
5) Using your budget more efficiently by minimizing the
number of amendments and rebriefs.

Question 46

What is Brand Storytelling?

Answer 46

Brand storytelling is a marketing competency that drives engagement at an emotional level. This results in improved business performance through communicating engaging and memorable stories about your business with your target audience. It’s a way of connecting with people who share your values and your beliefs and builds a personality for your company. It invites others into your community and embraces them in an authentic way.

Question 47

Why are brand stories valuable?

Answer 47

Stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts and figures. And brain activity increases to five times higher when a person is consuming information through a story. It helps your credibility. It will highlight your authenticity. It will support you in any times of crisis.

Question 48

What are some key tasks to identifying your brand’s story?

Answer 48

• Focus on the audience and their needs.
• Stick to a single message in the narrative.
• Use facts appropriately.
• Create characters in the story who reflect your audience.
• Develop dramatic tension in your ‘plot’ where possible, like:
  what’s next, and how will it end?
• Structure your story, so that it’s easier to understand. In other
  words, introduce the problem, show or describe how your
  characters deal with the problem, and showcase the
  resolution.

Question 49

What are are three categories of content that will enhance or fill out your particular brand personality?

Answer 49

• Functional
• Emotional
• Essential

Question 50

What is functional content?

Answer 50

This is purely fact-based content that’s not very emotive. This is a strong driver of action-based content and is directly related to the business or brand. It’s the hard sell. This includes announcements or news items.

Question 51

What is Emotional content?

Answer 51

This is the realm where you tap into the human experience and show a personality that allows consumers to relate to your business. This includes user testimonials, videos, and information about how your brand or product benefits and impacts the lives of your customers.

Question 52

What is Essential content?

Answer 52

This is the absolute bare minimum amount of information that a consumer needs to know about what you’re selling to interact with your business. This includes things like prices or contact information, which people will need to help them make a decision to buy or engage with your business.