If Digital Marketing is a tree, then the content is the leaves of that tree. If Digital Marketing is a car, then the content is its four wheels and if Digital Marketing is a book, then the content is its pages. What I mean to say is that a Digital marketing strategy is incomplete without content.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing refers to the way of online marketing for the promotion of one’s brand with the help of the internet to reach each of your target audience sitting at home. Digital marketing includes all ways of communicating throughout the world, e.g. emails and multimedia, etc.

Digital marketing  is responsible to manage the online presence of your brand and that very online presence is ranked over the internet by some perfect, genuine, relatable, reasonable, reliable content within your online portal ( website, GoogleMyBusiness, social media pages, etc.).

What is Content? 

Content refers to the material containing relevant information regarding a particular targeted topic. And in terms of Digital Marketing, Content means the online available material constituting your brand’s online portal or web. It can be in the form of text material, pictures, audio, or video graphic materials. The content shows knowledgeable information to the readers about some particular topics somewhat connected to your brand’s product or service.

Content has a magical power of increasing brand awareness which would enable your audience to stick around your brand and convert into brand fans. Relevant and engaging content will lead to a rise in your social media following as well leading to an increase in your popularity and goodwill.

Content plays a major role in Search Engine Optimization as well, which refers to the algorithm of raising and improving the visibility and ranking of your brand’s website over the internet. This includes optimization of various components in your content, like text, image, video, headlines, meta description and keywords used, etc. SEO is implemented not only to the websites but also on youtube and social media pages as well in order to help you raise in a particular niche by proper optimization techniques.

The more your content is regulated with SEO along with being relevant, genuine and relatable to the user’s searched keywords, the more it starts appearing on the top pages of search engine results reaching more people. 

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content Marketing Strategy refers to the planning of increasing your website visibility, improving the brand’s reputation and attracting more and more audience by creating knowledgeable, relevant and wanted information containing content.

A good content marketing strategy will help to increase the ROI i.e. Return on Investment of your brand. Customers will start to trust you based on the promises made and kept by the content you shared with them. Whenever a client or a customer visits your online portal and sees your value-giving content, they will realize the expertise possessed by your brand. 

Content is what the marketing funnel is made up of at each of its stages. Hence if one wants to ace Content Marketing then he must have relevant and engaging content ready to be used to mesmerize his audience.

Now the question arises how to generate engaging content for content marketing? Do not worry, I’m here for you with a step-by-step guide to Content Creation.

Step-by-Step Guide to Content Creation:

For the convenience of your understanding, I have bifurcated the entire process of content creation into 8 easy steps-

Step 1 for your content: set your Goals and Target Audience

The first step in content marketing is to have a roadmap of your mediators and the end goal of your content journey. What are you? What is your brand? What type of content will you be producing? What will be the theme of your content? Who is your target audience? What kind of content will your audience be attracted to? These are the questions whose answers must be at the fingertips of the content marketer.

You will need to have an accurate and a precise plan for your target audience. The content for your target audience must be relevant to generate their interest in what you have to offer them.

Step 2 for your content: rely over Buyer's journey on the Marketing Funnel

A marketing funnel is a business model which starts from awaring the public about you and your brand and reaches to the stage where some of those awarded people purchase the product/service from you.

Every single person under the range of your targeted audience is not necessarily interested in your product. So, your content should not solely be written with the intention of selling your product but with the intention of connecting to your audience thereby converting them to a probable customer.

You should start from creating awareness of your product or service, sharing its importance, and why your audience will need your product or service. This is what a marketing funnel is.

You must have created specific relevant content for every stage of the buyer's journey on this marketing funnel. Because the customers would first like to know about you and your product. Then when you make them understand its importance in their life, the customers think about it and take the decision. 

Step 3: decide the form of content concerning a particular platform

Content can be written and expressed in various forms like blogs, social media post, video slides etc. Along with websites these things turn out to be a big help in improving your online presence.

Blogs:

A blog is defined as a discrete and arranged form of well written and organized information about some particular topics made to be published on your website.

Writing blogs related to your product and service is something you can go for. For example- If you own a food delivery service then you can write blogs sharing various recipes of healthy nutrition food, information regarding good food places near particular areas etc. It is one of the significant ways of ranking on google.

Social Media Account:

You can also set up your social media account or a page and can start posting attractive, valuable and relevant posts there about your services. You can use reels, igtv, stories and many similar features in order to increase your reach.

Youtube Channel:

Setting  up your Youtube Channel and sharing video content over there to increase the popularity of your product or service is a very sought for approach these days. Vlogs are something that people make and post on youtube. They receive a lot of views once a youtube channel starts to gain subscribers.

Other Platforms

You can also diversify your online presence using professional platforms like LinkedIn, where you can make connections with people of the same community as yours and build trust, value and integrity among them. Using platforms like Quora and Reddit for giving people solutions to their problems, is also a new way to market digitally.

Step 4: make your content SEO-friendly

SEO which refers to Search Engine optimization which is is the algorithm of ranking of your website based on several factors that must be included in the content of your website. 

As it is already discussed that for ranking at the top in search engine results, SEO plays a significant role. But now the question arises: how will you make your content SEO friendly? Well, there are certain SEO rules and regulations which you have to follow and include the needed requirements in your content. 

Step 5: add some more ingredients in your content

Your content must have a catchy headline so that the user chooses to open your content despite of having hundreds of other available choices. Rather than using very technical words in your content marketing, you must write interesting and engaging content for the readers that is easy to understand and relate to. 

Step 6: Make use of available content creation tools 

The content that you wrote will only be read when it looks presentable and has a good use of beautiful Graphics. One must have a good knowledge of Graphic Designing for doing so. There are a lot of software and apps available for free on the internet that can be used or create engaging graphics. 

Step 7: Develop a Content Creation strategy

A content creation strategy is a plan for your website with the goal of raising the reputation, audience and ranking of your brand over the internet by including viral, sales and pillar content.

First comes SEO research, then comes Ideation of the content,and then comes the main writing part in the first phase of Content Creation. It must be to the point and user-engaging. It will be beneficial if you use the brand’s voice while writing the content. 

The second phase comprises the editing part, which is followed by proofreading your content, correcting the mistakes and finalizing the content.

Then in the third phase you can upload your content on your content management system that you use for publishing. After this all you need to do is promote it using either organic or inorganic ways.

Step 8: keep analyzing the growth of your content

Once you finalized your content and published it,  the most important task gets generated on this stage is of working on its marketing and keeping the track of its results. Is it going well? Or does it need some changes? You will need some data analysis skills for analyzing statistics like Organic traffic which is a result of SEO algorithms, inorganic traffic which results from paid promotions of your content, page views, bounce rate telling how many people are shifting to someone else’s content showing that yours was not enough in grabbing their attention.

Other parameters are audience growth, engagement rates, conversion rates etc. If everything is going positive, then it’s great but if you don’t notice any growth then you surely have to make changes in your process.

Conclusion:

Content creation is such an important parameter for digital marketing that if you are not able to handle it on your own, you must hire a good content creator for it but without any doubt, this Content Creation is something one cannot skip if he wants to promote his business online.

We all can see that today millions of people are engaging in content creation and if you are one amongst them then you need to have something different to present to your audience from what other people present. 

I hope that my step by step guide to Content Creation turned out to be of some help to you. Follow all the tips you read in this blog and I guarantee you if you work with proper strategy and dedication, your brand, even if it is a little startup will rise with a commendable  growth rate with consistent efforts of some months.