{"id":6144,"date":"2019-06-10T17:12:08","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T15:12:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bd.tridaz.eu\/obsahovy-marketing-system\/"},"modified":"2021-05-14T13:50:08","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T11:50:08","slug":"content-marketing-is-not-for-everyone-how-to-approach-it-systematically","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bd.tridaz.eu\/en\/content-marketing-is-not-for-everyone-how-to-approach-it-systematically\/","title":{"rendered":"Content marketing is not for everyone: How to approach it systematically"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article presents an expanded version of the presentation that I gave at the Content Marketing Night on April 23, 2019 (you can buy the video here). Thank you to Connect Coworking<\/a> for the invitation and to the audience for the great questions that helped me come up with the topic.<\/em><\/p>\n

Content marketing is being used by more and more companies in Slovakia – they produce content themselves (inhouse), with external assistance (the client is regularly visited by a PR or content specialist) or they have it prepared “turnkey”.<\/p>\n

You can easily find low-cost freelancers who produce dozens of “articles” a year for you on any topic for a few euros a page – for example on the micro-portal JaSpravim.sk or on marketing groups on Facebook. It’s just as easy to find opportunities to publish them on relatively  high-quality websites (and many webmasters are happy to prepare content for you).<\/p>\n

It looks like the fulfillment of the dystopian vision of “content shock” <\/strong>formulated by Mark Schaeffer. The author of the book “The Content Code” from 2015 warned that with the ease of publishing on the Internet (as opposed to the complexity and cost of publishing in print), the amount of content published outperforms people’s capacity to consume it.<\/p>\n

This means that the market places much higher demands on effective content marketing. Your content needs to be better<\/strong> than others in your area. At the same time, you need to invest your limited human and financial resources in the content marketing activities that drive business results the most.<\/strong><\/p>\n

If you expect a return on investment in content marketing<\/strong> and you want to be able to prove it<\/strong> in front of colleagues, you need to set your content marketing priorities correctly.<\/p>\n

Is content marketing a tactic suitable for you?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The leading authority on the subject, the Content Marketing Institute, defines content marketing as “a strategic marketing approach aimed at creating and disseminating valuable, relevant and consistent content<\/strong> to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately lead to profitable customer behavior.”<\/p>\n

The first point on your checklist should be the question of whether to invest in content marketing at all. This is a tactic that is not a mandatory part of an effective marketing strategy for all companies.<\/strong> For some,  marketing by spreading content to potential customers does not suit in terms of capacity, capabilities or positioning.<\/p>\n

You have to engage in content marketing if you can finance the creation of a broader content package (by investing time, internal capacity or the capacity of subcontractors).<\/p>\n

Quality content can almost never be delivered on a turnkey basis by someone outside <\/strong>without your ongoing support. Content requires some insight<\/strong> from you – insight into customer needs or problems. Obtaining it through customer research<\/strong> is expensive and even among the largest companies in Slovakia, it is rare to continuously carry out broader customer research (a combination of qualitative and quantitative, which is a duo necessary for long-term detection and understanding of customers).<\/p>\n

The basics of your content strategy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

So if you find that you want and can make content on topics of interest to your customers, you need to clarify your content marketing priorities. Content marketing offers extensive possibilities: it can be applied in every step of the customer journey and we have to choose from dozens of formats.<\/p>\n

1. It pays to create content along the customer’s path<\/strong><\/h2>\n

For most companies, content used in content marketing is just one of the marketing activities<\/strong> that reaches their potential customers. The content should therefore be aligned with other activities along the so-called customer path.<\/p>\n

In the practice of a larger company, this means that when planning content marketing, not only the people responsible for marketing communication or marketing should be involved, but also the people responsible for the product and business.<\/p>\n

For a smaller company or project, this requires at least a well-thought-out customer journey. Just choose one of the similarly thought-out models of the customer journey <\/strong>or marketing funnel, for example:<\/p>\n