Content Creation Marketing
5 Step Guide to Plan and Understand
Video
What Is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing is the creation and sharing of online information that doesn’t directly promote a brand.
Although not directly promoting a brand, Content Creation Marketing can indirectly create interest in a product or service.
Content Marketing Advantages
Building an audience takes time but with a content strategy that works, a business can reap rewards. Such as:
1. Build audience trust that can be monetised
Push Marketing (not content marketing) is placing an advertisement in front of users and asking them to buy. Push marketers are looking for short term sales i.e. Facebook Ads.
Contrastingly, content marketing is Pull Marketing. Pull Marketing draws customers to a company’s product or service by indirectly promoting content users wish to see. More on this later.
2. Content can last for years
Although content has a shelf life, blogs, free tools and alike can be built upon and updated to extend the material's relevance. Keeping your content updated offers the maximum return on your investment. You’ve already put the time into creating. Keeping it relevant and updated requires minimal effort.
3. Own over rent
Why pay for advertising on platforms like Facebook, Google and LinkedIn when you can create your own lead generation tool that users want to use.
4. Business/ Self Improvement
I’ve included this as an extra point because understanding and learning is incredibly important for businesses and often overlooked. Getting closer to your audience and understanding their problems is a great place to start before making the move to solving them. Creating content involves learning about your audience and gaining a more in depth understanding. The goal is to generate revenue (Content MARKETING) but the road to get there can be an incredible journey. Every day is a school day!
Content Marketing Disadvantages
1. Time To Create
Creating great content is no walk in the park.
Creating a great blog post can take days of research. A YouTube video requires multiple skill sets, think; videography, sound, lighting, editing, equipment, thumbnails, subtitles and copy.
2. Time To Discover
It can take months for a blog post to rank higher on Google. Your post has to be identified by the search engine as well as tested to see if audiences resinate means apply resin!!!!! before being displayed on page one, if it ever even gets there. We discussed push and pull marketing earlier in the article. Push marketing can produce sales on day one. Content Creation Marketing is pull marketing and can take weeks, months or years to have a true impact.
A great article on Indie Hackers stated that following analysis of 497 business founder interviews, being ranked on search engines was the their highest ranked customer acquisition tool. HOWEVER, they only attempted gaining rankings after the success of a separate customer acquisition method due to the time it took to receive results.
Top Content Marketing Examples
Content Marketing is a hot topic and there’s loads of examples of great use. Here’s some we’ve seen work well:
Example 1
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Adobe
Adobe have been trailblazers at the forefront of new a daring movements and earned their place as software giants - their move to SaaS subscription model in 2011-12, Behance acquisition, etc.
Recently they’ve seen great success producing high quality product tutorials on social media platform TikTok.
As competitor programs such as Affinity enter the market Adobe have done an incredible job at showcasing how their professional design tools are still cutting edge and save their users time and headaches. These videos are the right mix of informative and engaging and we can only speculate that they’ve experienced a boost in sales as a result.
Example 2
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HubSpot
Hubspot is a CRM (customer relationship management) platform providing a one stop shop for online growth tools; email marketing, SEO, analytics. Hubspot has limitations but there is no limit to how effective their content led marketing strategy has been.
Hubspot have slowly scaled to create; a flourishing blog, ownership of large email newsletters, a highly professional YouTube channel as well as a network of podcasts. They’ve effectively built out a niche media empire that drives traffic and awareness.
A key takeaway here is target audience. Hubspot’s product provides a tool for businesses to grow. Their content offers that same information indirectly. I.e. “5 Ways to build an incredible marketing plan”, “5 data-backed ways to build rapport”. The target readership is businesses actively engaging in growth.
Example 3
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GoPro
The action camera manufacturer GoPro know their product is being used in extreme and remote locations to produce unique adventure packed videos.
The company used their customers’ content to build out their own platform also giving users a broader space to share their videos online. This is called User-Generated Content UGC.
Whereas companies like Redbull are paying for extreme stunts, GoPro are leveraging their own customer base. Don’t forget that users can be brand ambassadors offering incredible social proof that surpasses what a business can say about their own product.
What Medium
When creating content there are many different methods you can choose. Spending the time to research (as you’re doing now) drives a deeper understanding giving you a higher chance of success.
Content Marketing can take months of hard work before delivering results so it’s important to have a strategy in place in order to sustain and enjoy the workload.
Here’s a list of some of the top Content Marketing methods:
Search:
- Blog
- Video (YouTube, native)
- Podcasts
- Online Courses
Free:
- Templates
- Checklists
- Stock; Images, Video, Audio
- Calculators tools (think mortgage etc.)
It might be helpful to look at the Japanese concept “Ikigai” referring to “a reason for being”. In its broken down form you would assess:
- What you love
- What you’re good at
- What the world needs
- What you can be paid for
Whatever meets in the middle is where you should devote your time.
I enjoy researching and writing blog content and wished to use it as a tool to drive users to yolkk.com. After writing the blog content I found it wasn’t a huge leap to turn that research into video format. One method that really helped was using a free online teleprompter tool. This way you don’t have to memorise a script, instead, choosing to simply read off a teleprompter.
Choose A Topic
Choosing a topic to produce content around can be difficult but is necessary.
You don’t have to choose a niche on day one but if my next video was a cooking tutorial you might raise an eyebrow. You need a strategy and the best place to start is to understand what your customers are searching online.
You can always take the time to sit down and assess at a later date. You might be able to niche based off the content that has gained the most traction as well as what you’ve enjoyed most creating.
Competitor Research
One of the best places to start is to see what your competitors are producing!
It’s unlikely that you’re the first to the picnic and gaining an understanding of what your competition is investing in gives you the chance to both research and assess.
Ensure you’re watching competitor videos, read articles and generally engage in what you're asking your audience to. All will increase your knowledge but also give you an opportunity to understand if you can offer insights your competitors have missed. Do they have a weakness you can exploit?!
It’ll also provide a chance to see what you enjoy. Although writing an article is very different to reading one you can see which subjects spur you into action.
Proven Topic
It’s likely best to focus on a proven topic. You want people to interact with your content and the best way to do this is basing it off a subject already being searched.
Sometimes it’s obvious if a free template, YouTube video etc. is popular just by seeing how many downloads or views the content has. When you’re looking at blog content it can be a little more difficult. Fortunately there are free tools like seobility and ahrefs to gain a little more insight.
Trending Topic
Focusing on upcoming and trending topics is another strategy but does carry risk.
When cryptocurrency became more normalised there was a whole host of YouTubers, bloggers and alike that managed to monetise their online authority on the subject.
TikTok is another example. TikTok’s rise to becoming a tech giant paved a wave of opportunity for those that understood how to market and gain audiences on the platform.
The risk involved is that your chosen platform doesn’t go the distance. For example, 28 million users downloaded the app Clubhouse which launched in 2020. Users gradually declined in mid-2021 leaving businesses that invested in its growth didn’t see the return on investment they hoped for.
Keyword Research
If you spent the time actioning all the above you might have landed yourself an idea.
It’s now worth investing a little more time by using some free keyword research tools.
You might have already chosen a hot topic but whichever platform you’re using, you need to display the right title to give yourself the best chance of being found.
For instance, at present (for you in the past) this article title is “Content Marketing” however after researching associated keywords on tools like Wordtracker and WordStream we identified the keyword “Content Marketing" as too competitive.
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Search terms such as “blogging marketing” and the website “contentmarketinginstitute” were much less competitive but weren’t ideal articles.
What caught our eye was “Content Creation Marketing”. Although a much lower search volume the title lacked extreme competition and only twelve articles in the UK used this phrase on both their title tag and use of a backlink.
Billion dollar companies with the resources like HubSpot can set their site’s on titles such as “Content Marketing”. It’s important for smaller businesses to be realistic about their objectives.
Content
The action plans in place and you’re raring to get started. This is the last stop.
Content Quality
Your content needs to be amazing.
In the past, content producers could use tricks to boost their rankings. Google and other search engines have evolved. Although they still take into account different criteria they’re definitely looking at how your audience engages with your content, i.e. the amount of time they spend watching your video or reading your post.
Producing quality may take longer but it’s worth the time.
Blogs & Video
If you’re thinking of producing a blog or video, users like to see examples. Finding these requires more research. Make sure when conducting research you’re taking notes of where this information came from. It’s definitely helps to have page links within your article referencing information sources.
User Experience UX
How the user engages with your content will impact the time it takes to grow.
Tech giants are masters of eliminating unnecessary steps to create a frictionless customer journey.
Think pressing buying products on the Amazon App. Amazon managed to eliminated the checkout page lowering the time and effort required to buy on their platform.
Our own website has features to improve the user experience.
- An accessible table of contents runs along our blog posts.
- With more and more customers reading on backlit screens we’ve enabled a “dark mode”
- The font size and spacing was determined following research on the topic.
All the above is an effort to provide a frictionless journey for users. These days a website is the face of any company. If you’re not investing in a great online customer journey why invest heavily in directing customers to the platform?
Content Consistency
When engaging in Content Creation you’re looking to build a habit.
A one off YouTube video or blog is unlikely to interest Google. It requires time to become an expert and tailor your work to resinate and engage with an audience.
TubeBuddy analysed 3.5 million YouTube users and found channels with:
- 1-10K subscribers on average had 152 uploads
- 10-100K subscribers averaged 418 uploads
- 100K- 1 Million subscribers averaged 1171 uploads
- 1 Million + subscribers averaged 3873 uploads
These figures are an average, nevertheless paint a picture that you will need to create a habit out of creating content in order to grow using a Content Marketing Strategy.
Conclusion
Content Creation Marketing is a great way to reach an audience but it’s foolish to adopt the strategy blind.
It takes time and investment to build quality content but eventually the strategy should pay dividends.
You need to adopt a mix of creating quality content as well as consistently producing.
We wish you the best of luck in producing your own Content Marketing Strategy
