We are all inundated with content daily. According to Forbes, “the average daily digital content consumption is now six hours and 59 minutes, which includes phone, TV, and other forms of digital media.” So, if you want your business to be seen by the right people at the right time, a content marketing strategy is essential. 

If you’re new to the Coffee Date Media (CDM) website, you might ask yourself what content marketing is and why it’s so important. Below we’ll answer some questions about content marketing and why it’s never too late to start.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a word thrown around in the marketing industry, often with very little explanation. Simply put, it’s a marketing method to share valuable content with your target audience to drive credibility and authority, and ultimately drive customer action. The Content Marketing Institute also shares a fantastic definition below.

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing efforts look different than your typical advertising. Content marketing involves building trust with your audience, generating leads by answering their questions, and establishing credibility in your industry. On the other hand, your other marketing efforts may be directly correlated to your sales process and capturing leads. While your sales process is outbound, your content marketing is about gathering inbound leads.

So how does this happen? Content marketing for your brand can look like a published website article, white paper, case studies, how-to’s, videos, social media posts, testimonials, and other pieces of content designed to capture audience attention. The content is specifically designed to take your customer through each part of the customer journey process.

How do I build a content marketing plan?

First and foremost, before executing any content marketing efforts, you need a strategy. Below we’ve outlined the four steps in our content strategy process.

Step 1: Website and Content Audit

Our content strategy process starts with a website and content audit. We begin by reviewing your brand’s online performance, both website and social, compared to your competitors. Additionally, we evaluate your current messaging compared to your competitors. The goal of reviewing your messaging and performance with competitors is to look for your brand’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Step 2: Recommendations and Distribution Strategy

Next, we prioritize the opportunities and define the distribution strategy to ensure efficiency and effectiveness. By prioritizing all recommendations, you’ll have a foundation of actionable items. Next, your distribution strategy will bring your content strategy to life by specifying what content will be where and for what reason. Then, your creative team will be able to begin.

Step 3: Creative Stage

Now that we’ve set your creative team up for success, they start doing what they do best. All of their creative concepts should align with the recommendations from the content strategy. After you approve their creative ideas, they can build out the concept per each distribution outlined in the previous step.

Step 4: Measure Success

You did it! Your content marketing is live, but there’s still one last step in the process – measuring success. The only way to measure the success of your content marketing is by looking at the analytics and data associated with each platform and distribution source. 

We recommend having someone on your team who can decipher why some of your content performs better than others. Then, you can make adjustments and optimizations to meet your business goals.

A content strategy is essential to any business, and we’re here to help. Visit our services page to see how we can get started on a custom content strategy for your brand.