What is Content Marketing? How to Create an Integrated Content Marketing Strategy in 2022?
Content marketing is the process of creating high-quality relevant content for your target audience and distributing it to through a variety of channels to ensure it reaches them.
Content marketing = High-quality relevant content (Creation + Distribution)
The main goal of any content marketing effort is to provide value to the target audience and drive them make a profitable action for your business. With this target in mind, a content marketer produces content that attracts, informs and engages the target audience and makes sure it reaches them at the right time in their consumer journey.
However, most businesses assume blogs are the only form of content that needs to be produced for their content marketing efforts which is as true as saying google ads being the only form of paid advertising. Content marketing is too extensive to get limited to blogs, articles or white papers and it caters to a wide variety of formats of content.
So what is content in content marketing? Let us find out with the inputs from our content marketers at Samskriti Business Solutions.
What is Content?
In simple words, content is the presentation of information that is produced in a form for the purpose of audience consumption.
Content Format Types:
As said the presentation of relevant information is called content and the way you present the information is the format of the content. So the format can be a long-form article, blog, image, meme, video, e-book, webinar, case study, how-to-guides, white papers, testimonials, influencer reviews and more.
The right type of content format that works the best is chosen based on the demographics of the target audience, their style of content consumption, medium and the niche segment of the product/service. Usually, at Samskriti Business Solutions, we choose the right blend of all the available content formats for our clients to prepare an integrated content marketing plan for the audience at all stages of the consumer funnel.
And how do we do it? By following and time tested content marketing strategy which starts with understanding our targeting audience.
Content Marketing – Understanding the Targeting Audience:
Understanding the target audience is the fundamental pillar for content creation or distribution when it comes to content marketing. Though information about demographics and interests is already at hand, content marketing needs further drill down into the target audience by understanding the following aspects:
1. Cultural impact – Understanding the culture of the audience plays a vital role in content creation when especially in a diverse country like India. Getting this right eliminates communication and presentation mishaps.
2. Content consumption behaviour- With more content formats available than ever, analysing the content consumption behaviour of the audience is the only way ahead for choosing the right audience and content formats.
3. Social media consumption – Given the content formats and social media channels are closely aligned with each other, this helps us focus more efforts on the right channels.
4. Pain points of the target audience – Knowing the challenges, hopes, dreams, anxieties, barriers and pain points of the audience is a pillar for the creation of relevant content that resonates with the audience.
That said understanding the target audience is only the first step of creating a content marketing plan. This first step is followed by mapping the right content formats for the consumer journey, the coveted 7A framework for content creation, maintenance and content calendar and content distribution network, collaborations and finally measuring and optimising the content marketing performance. Each of the steps will be discussed in our next blogs at www.samskritisolutions.com
However if you are business that is looking to kick-start the content marketing efforts for your business right away, Samskriti Business Solutions is the best digital marketing company in Hyderabad that can help you. As a certified content marketing company in Hyderabad we provide high-performing content marketing strategy and execution by leveraging our extensive digital marketing tools and network. You can reach out to us here.