Content Marketing M2 Flashcards
What is Content
The internet is essentially made up of content. If we step back from our screens, we can see that the
internet is simply a means to navigate content, words, text, opinions, images, and videos.
Content Intent Stages of the buyer’s journey
Always make sure that your content has a clear intention. Consumers can easily spot a lack of
intention, and when they do, they won’t react to your content.
Awareness: 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.
Interest: Capture the audience’s attention beyond awareness and convince them of your proposition.
Consideration: 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. Always ask yourself, “What do customers need to know to help them say ‘yes’ to choosing your brand?” This is the consideration content you will need to create.
Conversion: Foster an enticing and personalized 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.
Retention: 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.
What topical content
Topical content: Is newsworthy, time-sensitive content that is linked to a topic and is best suited to a particular moment in time.
Basically, it is relevant to what’s happening in the world right now. It’s important to note that because topical content is tied to a moment in time, it has a shorter lifespan than evergreen content.
Examples of formats used for topical content include:
short written pieces
tweets and social media posts
memes, videos, and images
What is Evergreen content
Evergreen content: Is content that can be used at various stages of the buyer’s journey.
Evergreen content has a longer lifespan and is generally of high value, allowing you to drive
conversions and brand affinity over a longer period of time as people will always be looking for this kind of ‘timeless’ content.
This also means that evergreen content can be repurposed into different formats, maximizing your content creation time and efforts.
Examples of formats used for evergreen content include:‘how-to’ articles video tutorials beginner’s guides FAQs case studies list articles checklists
Content marketing goals
We’re going to lo
Note: 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. The details are passed on as a lead, so the company’s sales team can then follow up with the person and try to sell their products or services to them.
Affinity
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.
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.
Advocacy
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.
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.
What is Buyer Persona
Buyer personas help you understand your customers and prospective customers better. Once you
have decided on your content marketing goals, you need to consider who the people who typically
buy from you are, the people you want to market to.
For this, you can create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is an imaginary character based on
research and data that represents your ideal buyer or target audience.
Content Types
Formats
There are many content types and formats that content marketers can use in their content
marketing mix.
White papers are a great knowledge sharing resource that can help you build thought
leadership and credibility within your industry. They’re a strong lead generation tool and can
also be a great awareness tool.
Ebooks are often shorter and a lot more interactive than white papers. They generally focus
on multimedia content and ‘how-to’ guides, rather than thought leadership pieces. Ebook
formats are more likely to be read as they contain functional benefits that businesses can
implement immediately.
Infographics allow you to take large sets of data and turn them into an interesting visual
story. Look towards user research, customer data, or information from a historical context in
terms of the impact your business has had to create interesting infographics.
Blogging is an effective tool that allows businesses to journal their activity through the forms
of text and imagery. A blog usually sits on a company website and allows you to create a
great structure that drives search engine ranking. Case studies are often featured as topics within blog posts. These are evergreen pieces of content, but they can also develop thought
leadership and credibility with your potential customers.
Interactive content encourages users to take an action and interact with your page within a
social space. Interactive content delivers over 500% more engagement than static posts in
the newsfeed. Interactive content formats include images, video, click-through, and polls.
Videos are the number one content format on the web, with the majority of video being
viewed on mobile. Audience attention rates are short and there is a lot of competition online,
so make sure that you’re creating short, sharable, bite-sized videos that will capture the
attention of your audience. Video formats include ephemeral, live, short-form, and social TV.
Articles are long-form social posts that work to build thought leadership and demonstrate
expertise in a particular area. You can post articles to a blog or to certain social media sites.
Articles focus on a specific topic or theme to drive conversation and engagement and
usually include images, video, and CTAs along with text and sometimes other media. Engage
with comments on articles to continue to display your credibility and expertise in the subject
area.
Templates and checklists can be useful content formats for seeding content to your
potential customers. These allow you to build credibility, help solve a pain point, and add real
true effort to help your audience.
Webinars are web-based seminars that provide you with an opportunity to connect to your
audience in a human way by putting a face or voice to your offering. Theme your webinars
on a specific area of your expertise and use visual aids such as videos, animations, or slide
decks to talk the audience through solving their business needs or to educate them in a
specialized area.
Podcasts are audio recordings that users can listen to on smartphone apps or through audio
streaming services. Types of podcasts include interviews, conversations, reviews,
storytelling, show recordings, and Q&A. When you’re creating a podcast, make sure that you
have a good quality recording set up and focus on a single theme. If you plan to record a
series of podcasts, it is good practice to follow a clear structure that will be used consistently
across episodes so listeners know what to expect.
Types of Curation
There are four main types of curated content:
Aggregation means curating the most relevant content about a topic into a single piece or
viewpoint. This is the most common form of curation, and the basis of most content curations
services available for use or purchase.
Distillation takes the overall ‘noise’ about a topic and reduces it to its core concept. The best
cases of social content curation can be catalogued into this definition.
Mashups merge different content about a topic to create a new original point of view.
Chronology is historiographical content curation. Typically, this method consists of presenting a
timeline of curated information to show the evolution of a specific topic.
What is Content Seeding
A good content strategy will involve content creation at its heart. What you do with that content, and
getting it to your intended audience, is what we’ll look at in content seeding.
Content seeding is a strategic approach to publishing your content across the entire web so that it is
seen by an audience who will positively engage with it. This can be achieved by publishing your
content on key platforms where it will be picked up and distributed by social influencers, content
producers or publications. Optimizing your content per platform is a key consideration so that you
avoid overlap as much as possible.
engagement metrics
Engagement metrics include:
higher average time on site, reduced bounce rates
increased numbers of returning visitors
more pages viewed per session
scroll depth, for example, 50% of users get to the end of a blog
growth in discovery through organic search or social visitors
increased number of people searching for your brand
higher channel engagement metrics, for example, social shares, email opens, brand
mentions, and more links to your content, which is good for long-term SEO, and so on
Conversion metrics include:
higher number of goals achieved
increased conversion rate
shorter path to purchase
reduced cost per sale or lead
