The five pillars of content marketing
Want to know what content advertising is based on? Please read our article on the five pillars of content marketing to understand its process and structure.
It’s undeniable that an incredible amount of content is produced. Did you recognize that over 2 million blog posts are created every day? And more content is created in 48 hours than was produced between the beginning of history and 2003?
So trying to be relevant and thrive in this vast ocean of content can be challenging. One of the most common mistakes is trying to do too much before understanding the principles and fundamentals of the entire content marketing process.
Fortunately, we’re here to help.
Before creating content, properly defining and understanding the content marketing process will give you a big head start when it counts.
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience – and ultimately drive profitable customer actions.
The content marketing process is understood as a framework supported and defined by five pillars. Each pillar addresses one aspect of the process, from the creation itself to the user experience, distribution, and learning from the results.
So let’s take a look at each pillar, what it means, and how it can help you launch an effective and successful marketing campaign. Are you ready? Let’s go
1. Target audience
You ought to always know who you are targeting before you do anything with any form of marketing, and content marketing is no exception.
Creating the right content for your brand is understanding your audience – who they are, what they want, and how to appeal to them.
Segmenting and analyzing your audience allows you to create targeted, tailored content that speaks to your readers’ needs. Targeted content is far more effective at attracting visitors, converting visitors, and marketing your business. And the only way to create genuinely tailored content is to understand your audience intimately.
Understanding your audience is a two-pronged process. You require to know your current customers, but you also need to know who your potential customers are and think about who else might be interested in your offering.
Many marketers use customer personas to determine who they want to target with their content. Can use personas to test ideas and solve problems based on who you are currently targeting and who you might want to target in the future.
2. Creation
It will not surprise you that creating your content is an essential part of the content marketing process and that content creation takes the most time, creativity, and productivity.
To create good content, you need to come up with practical ideas, then draft, edit, and tweak them to make sure they do exactly what you want them to do and work effectively.
Creativity and productivity are essential in this process. However, content needs to be produced at scale in most organizations, and maintaining creativity and productivity at scale can be challenging.
Forcing a constant stream of brilliant, unique content is beyond the capabilities of almost any marketing team. Still, with a slight change to your process, you don’t have to develop new ideas every day to produce new content anyway.
Content atomization – creating content in different formats – means that the same creativity can be used to achieve different goals and reach different audiences. By creating blog posts, videos, infographics, and various other forms of content based on the same creative idea, your content will be more widely distributed, reach more people, and be more effective.
Using the best tools and processes to create the right content will give you a solid foundation to build the rest of your content marketing pillars.
3. Experience
The pillars of content marketing build on each other to achieve the most successful results. As a result, each pillar is directly dependent on the previous ones, and the framework requires a consistent approach to be successful.
Content experience is about how your chosen audience engages with and consumes the content you create. It’s also an essential component of figuring out where and how your content generates leads and tweaking it further to make it more successful.
The top priority should be that your content provides a great experience for everyone who reads it.
A great experience means readers are more likely to return to your website, trust your business, and take the action you want them to take.
Creating optimized content that delivers a great user experience requires certain elements:
- First, you need to create great content specifically targeted to your chosen audience. That includes in-depth knowledge of your current and potential customers.
- Next, your design needs to be user-friendly and responsive. It should inspire action and work on all devices.
- Your content should be easy to find. Of course, that means it needs to be SEO friendly, but it should also be evident on your website! The last thing you want is hidden content because that means your website visitors will bounce before they find it and look elsewhere for solutions.
- Finally, it would be best if you never forgot about your CTAs. They should feel like a natural, integrated part of the overall content and provide a significant, relevant next step for the visitor. If you get your CTAs right, your job will be much easier.
4. Advertising
As soon as you have your web content ready, you need to distribute it. Promoting and distributing your content to your target audience is arguably just as important as creating the content itself. It is highly dependent on how comprehensively you have implemented the last pillars of your content marketing strategy.
Distributing your content combines four factors: finding the proper channels, building a community, building relationships, and measuring success.
Finding the proper channels to distribute your content is not as simple as choosing the most popular social media platform and posting.
Sure, Instagram or TikTok might be all the rage right now, but you’re wasting your time if your specific audience isn’t represented there. Don’t try to force your content where it’s not working or try to get your audience to join a new channel. Focus your time, energy, and sources on the channels where your content is most effective and where your audience already resides.
Email marketing is still an incredibly effective method to send your content to a community already expressing interest. But you need to build that community first! Building an extensive, quality email subscriber list takes time but pays off in the long run.
Building good relationships with others who can help you spread and amplify your content is necessary. Although cold approaching can work, taking the time to build a real relationship with someone is much more fulfilling and thriving in the long run. Finally, always measure, analyze, and test what works and what doesn’t.
5. Insight
The final pillar in the content marketing strategy should be the final pillar in any marketing framework. Knowing why you are doing something and what things work will make your marketing efforts more straightforward and more successful.
You should always use your content to gain insights and collect data.
- Which content is the most successful,
- How your audience responds to certain kinds of content at any given time,
- Where your content is most successful, and, Everything else in between.
To gather accurate and relevant data, you need to collect data from suitable sources – Google Analytics and your marketing automation platform. But also from other analytics sources that can give you solid measurements of crucial content marketing metrics.
You need to make sure you’re reporting and regularly sharing to make tweaks and updates as needed.
It would be best to analyze how your content is performing in terms of ROI. That can be not easy, but it’s essential to decide where to allocate your resources. Gaining good insights brings the five pillars full circle, as they feed into the first pillar and make your content marketing strategy a self-sustaining, continuous, and ever-improving process!
Content advertising can be a challenging endeavor, but it can also be an insanely effective way to reach potential customers.
Seobea helps you increase the number of people who visit your site by finding, creating, and promoting content relevant to the niche you’re targeting. We provide monthly reports on the performance of all our content marketing clients. We collect information directly through our own analytics tool and through Google Search Console, and then we present it in an easily readable format. You can check out the Keywords tab on the Content marketing page to see which words you’re currently ranking for on Google. The report also shows how far you’ve come. Use this report to keep track of the progress of our content marketing services.
For more please visit Seobea.
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