A word on content

A definition: Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on planning, creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – so that the desired action comes at the end of their decision-making process.

Why is content marketing so effective? The key to its success lies in the fact that it is unforced. It is marketing with added value for the customer. That is why people do not see it as advertising but as useful information that helps them improve their lives.

How to define content marketing goals: The basic goal is to build and maintain good relationships with different audience groups through a strategic approach to content. Good relationships are the precondition for the action you ultimately want to arrive sooner, more easily and more often.

Content marketing covers a wide range of formats to choose from depending on your goal. The most widespread is the blog post or article, mainly thanks to its versatility and relatively low production cost. When choosing formats, we should always start from what we want to achieve by publishing the content and what action we expect from the audience afterwards.

The basics: Content marketing and copywriting are very closely related, but they are not synonyms. Content marketing is the production of original content in various forms with the long-term goal of engaging customers. Copywriting is working with text and shaping it so that it leads to the desired action immediately.

Slow and steady goes further. If your goal is to collect orders as fast as possible, do not treat content marketing as your primary communication tool. Content marketing is a long-term process that helps you build and maintain good customer relationships. In the long run it does benefit sales – it teaches customers to buy from you, more often and frequently in larger volumes. For the fastest conversion, a different type of campaign is a better choice.

The biggest advantage is that content reaches even customers who block other forms of communication. At first glance it may also seem that anyone can do content. That is its biggest advantage and its drawback at the same time – because it is not true. Before you step into planning, creating and managing content, it is good to be aware not only of the benefits but also of the pitfalls.

Especially in recent years, content marketing has become an indispensable helper for many marketers in building a brand. Most companies in the vast majority of industries can profit from good content. Still, there are sectors and services where content marketing, given its long-term nature, does not look ideal. So the foundation is knowing yourself, your business and your customers.

For companies doing business online, including e-shops, content marketing should become one of the pillars of the marketing mix. If your reach is very local, or if most of your business consists of emergency call-outs (breakdown services, towing and the like), content creation will not be your priority. Even then, though, interesting content can surprise.

Thanks to good education, a person develops personally, socially and economically. Education helps us do our everyday activities in the best possible way and gain new skills and knowledge that shape our lives. Learning is natural to us. It is a continuous process that never ends.

Without ongoing evaluation you cannot tell what content marketing brings you – whether the content you produce and publish meets the needs of your audiences and whether it moves their behaviour in the desired direction. When tracking results, however, you need to keep the long-term nature of this activity in mind.

As with any other analytics, the data is not easy to read. The fact that these activities pursue long-term goals complicates things further. It can easily happen that the effect of a particular article or other piece of content only shows several weeks or even months after publication.

How to approach the analysis. Analysing results starts at the very opposite end of the process – with setting goals. Naturally, the goals themselves should be based on an analysis of the current situation. Through the initial analysis and goal-setting you define the areas you want to improve with content marketing, and therefore the parameters you should primarily track. It is highly likely, though, that if you get content marketing right, other metrics will improve as well.

When analysing data, keep a consistent approach and stay with it over time. There is no point in tracking and reporting changes in page views one month and focusing on social media visits the next. Such short-term analyses matter when you run a time-limited campaign. To evaluate the benefits of content marketing, you need to follow trends and changes in the performance of the website and the business as a whole over the long term.

One thing needs to be said openly – however great your products are, your customers basically do not care about them. They do not need your product or service – they need to satisfy their needs and solve their problems. Focus your content on those areas.

Content marketing is like a first date. If all you do is talk about yourself, there won’t be a second one.

When looking for the right recipe, try looking at your products and services from the opposite side. Do not ask only what they are for, what their strengths are and why they are good. Focus on what they serve – which needs and emotions they satisfy. Once you get there, you can widen your pool of ideas to include every other way of satisfying that need, and use them to broaden the topics of your blog, videos or any other content. It is a kind of creative loop in which you end up placing other options next to your business that directly or indirectly “compete” with your products and services. Here is an illustrative example:

Joint nutrition. Company XY sells a food supplement for healthy joints. It decided to raise awareness of the product through content marketing and start a blog on its website with interesting information that could be useful to customers. The target group is primarily older people aged 50+ and, secondarily, athletes.

Which needs does the product meet?

• being healthy
• being active
• staying self-sufficient

Which emotions does it work with?

• fear
• helplessness
• pain
• energy

What the customer really needs:

• to keep their independence and not rely on the help of others
• to feel confident and active, to be able to move freely
• to feel young and be able to take part in social life

Which topics can the communication also include?

• information on community events, activities and places where you can meet interesting people and make new friends
• a “wear and tear” calculator based on height, weight and lifestyle, with recommendations on diet and exercise
• recipes for meals that support joint nutrition
• simple guides to solving everyday things online (ordering food, finding a repairman and so on)
• facts about herbs, tips on natural painkillers, first aid for headaches, how doctors and nations dealt with pain throughout history, and so on