Making High-Quality Content a Part of a Marketing Strategy

Internet audiences have wised up. After years of consuming in-your-face advertising and hard sell content, they've became so fed up with it, they simply won't read it if they see it. So online entrepreneurs realized that to get more customers, the needed to switch from traditional, “salesy” marketing techniques that became ineffective. To grow audience engagement, drive sales, generate, develop a brand presence online, and achieve many other marketing goals, they needed a new approach.

This new approach that allows meeting all these goals is creating high-quality, customer-centered content. Online audiences love helpful content that offers them actionable tips, so high-quality content has become a critical part of marketing strategies in many online businesses. To maximize the effectiveness of content as a part of marketing strategy, one has to develop a deep understanding of the relationship between quality and audience responses.

What is High-Quality Content and How it Generates Audience Response?

One of the essential features of successful content marketing is quality, and we're going to focus our attention on it in this section. Before the modern content marketing, promoting products and services online was easy because advertising was business-focused. In 2018, however, only customer-focused, high-quality content can work.

But what is “high-quality” content?

To get a good definition, we’ll turn to experts. Google, for example, provides an excellent description of the basic criteria that define high-quality content that can rank high in search results:

• Usefulness to readers
• Uniqueness and novelty
• Includes keywords that readers use to find such content
• Easy-to-read, written in natural language
• Lacking awkward, sloppy content with spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Since you want your business to be featured in Google search results, meeting these points is one of the key factors that determine the growth and success of your company.

Let’s now talk about how to create a documented content marketing strategy so you can integrate it with your main marketing strategy.

How to Create a Quality Content Marketing Strategy

Having a clearly-defined content marketing strategy has numerous benefits for your business. For example:

• It allows to improve skills of creating, publishing and managing useful content
• It facilitates communication with target audiences
• It helps to create an image of your business as a thought leader.

Since having a content marketing strategy is critical to surviving and thriving in today’s highly competitive market (in fact, 62 percent of marketers report having a documented content marketing), here are the steps that you need to take to create it.

(We’re focusing on the integration and the alignment with your overall marketing strategy, so treat these steps as a checklist).

• Define the audience for your content and the ways how they prefer to consume content. Ask yourself the following questions: “What is my target audience? How does my target audience like to consume content – read as an article, infographic, etc.?
• Create content personas (or sometimes referred to as “user personas”) to identify their needs and values. A content persona is a representation of your ideal reader that contains information about their age, gender, job, income, typical problems they face, interests, etc. Download a free persona template and examples to see how it’s done.
• Create content – articles, infographics, images, etc. This step includes an actual content creation process; for example, writing articles on topics that are interesting and relevant to your target audience. Obviously, writing involves a lot of research and drafting, so the use of online tools such as Hot Essay Service, Rewarded Essays, and Supreme Dissertations is often recommended for those without a lot of experience in that.
• Polish your content. Content creation doesn’t mean that it’s ready to be published. For example, often services like IsAccurate are used to find translation agencies to adapt content to local audiences. Moreover, a thorough proofreading and editing process follows to make sure that the content meets all requirements. To make this process more efficient, businesses often use online proofreading tools such as Get Good Grade and Flash Essay.
• Create a content calendar and stick to it. It prevents from posting on the fly and is an effective tool to organize their content and streamline communication.
• Share the content using your blog, social media accounts, and other available and relevant resources. Stick to your content calendar.
• Measure the effectiveness of your content marketing and make changes to ensure continuous improvement. Content marketing is a process that evolves to meet the evolving needs of customers, so continuous adjustment and improvement is a must. For example, you can see what kind of content performs the best and produce more of it.

Now that you know the essentials of creating a high-performing content marketing strategy, it’s time to align it with your overall marketing strategy.

How to Make Content a Part of Your Marketing Strategy

Achieving these goals as well as aligning content marketing and your main marketing strategy requires to complete the following.

1. Improve Content through Collaboration
Content creation and promotion is the main task of your marketing department, but your sales team also uses it, so ignoring this key player is a mistake. “For example, the sales department could help you adjust content creation because they also play an important role in adjusting the communication with the target audience,” says Alan Schmidt, a senior content writer at Top Writer Review.

As the result, sales professionals could give valuable tips to modify content to generate better, richer results or provide examples of the content that performed well in similar campaigns.

2. Automate Content Marketing
Content marketing automation is a huge deal these days. According to this compilation from Email Monday, the U.S. marketing automation software industry was a $3.3 billion market in 2017 and was growing by 30 percent annually. The list of benefits of automation included optimized performance, improved campaign management, acquiring more customers, increasing marketing ROI, and aligning marketing and sales.

Aligning marketing and sales! That’s exactly what we’re looking for.

“By using marketing optimization tools, you’re allowing your sales and marketing departments to see how leads and customers interact with the content and collaborate on productivity improvement,” explains Ted Morrison, a digital marketer at Citarior. “In other words, automation can provide insight into what content performs best, and adjust the content marketing strategy accordingly.”

3. Collect Customer Feedback
Another important condition for an effective incorporation of content marketing into your main marketing strategy is a coordinated effort in collecting and analyzing customer feedback. It goes without saying that customer feedback is critical for the success of your business, so taking advantage of it requires an effective collaboration between sales and marketing departments.

Marketing professionals don’t interact with customers a lot, but they need to have a good understanding of who they are and what the need. That’s where sales professionals come in. If these two groups work well to collect and analyze customer feedback, your business has a good chance to deliver what your customers want.

Therefore, having clear guidelines for this collaboration is crucial for the improvement of your content creation and marketing effort.

The Bottom Line

Making content a part of your main marketing strategy could be a challenging task but it’s something that you absolutely have to do to survive and thrive in the highly-competitive online markets. Hopefully these tips will give you the knowledge you need to achieve that and make content creation an effective and strategic process that will bring you long-term success.

Bridgette Hernandes is a researcher and blogger who spends most of her time polishing her skills and sharing useful content on digital marketing, sales, content creation, and online business management. Currently, she writes articles for Rated by Students. In addition to writing, her passions include coffee, social media, and traveling.