Content Marketing: Benefits, Strategies & How AI Changed It

Content creation & marketing has been a core part of Marketing for a long time. But what many people get wrong when creating a content marketing strategy is Storytelling!

Storytelling can be the difference between marketing that is impactful and something which is just another Ad on social media.

Needless to say, storytelling is not the only thing that is important for content marketing, there are many things that one has to determine when creating their content marketing strategy. Target audience, brand voice, consistency, quality, brand colours, type of content etc. In this article we’ll look at the needs & ways to create a content marketing strategy that works best for your brand & business.

Content Marketing is the process of creating & distributing various types of content like videos, articles, social media posts, blogs etc. to attract the attention of your target audience, spread awareness about your brand & convert the same audience into loyal customers.

Content marketing has been around since old times. From the town crier selling newspapers in the city square to the pop-up ads that you see after visiting a website. The most visible difference is the priority given to the way we market our content today.

Despite the plethora of ways that we have at our disposal for marketing our content the importance of it has hardly changed. Instead it has only increased & will continue to do so.

Research shows that businesses with blogs get 67% more leads & 67% marketers claim to have seen an increase in leads due to B2B content marketing.

With the current algorithms of social media platforms which pushes short video content, Instagram reels & Youtube shorts have shown to be nearly 88% more effective when included in content marketing plans.

People buy what they see & with the amount of content that an average person consumes in one day just on one social media platform & the amount of content that gets posted everyday is a huge mountain to climb. Having a thorough content marketing strategy will certainly assist in gaining more visibility.

Now that we have successfully completed the task of getting more visibility online the next step that comes in the content marketing funnel is thinking how to convert these leads. This is only possible after conducting proper research on your target audience. 

Determine the kind of content your customers consume, interact with. Alongside with what they are in need/want of.

The type of customers that businesses have to interact with today are pretty straightforward in choosing the content they consume. If you are able to provide them with valuable, relevant & entertaining content which is easy to consume then the consistency with which customers come back for your content will increase.

To be able to take full advantage of content marketing one needs to prepare a well researched strategy. A usual content marketing strategy consists of the following:

Creating a strategy begins with a vision of where exactly you want to reach. Having clear objectives & KPIs already set in place is the first step towards creating a good marketing strategy. Choose S.M.A.R.T goals for easy evaluation.

Determining the type of demography you plan to target for your marketing efforts is probably marketing 101 in any sales & marketing book. Choosing already existing markets or creating consumer personas can help in testing how your marketing efforts will work.

Determining the type of content & the relevant topics that your target audience consumes and then finding what method fits your brand the best early on can save a lot of content creation efforts.

Simply posting the content on all social media platforms is an effective way to waste all your previous efforts & resources so far which I honestly would advise against. Instead, it’s better to research where the majority of your target audience is & then focusing your efforts on those platforms the most.

Targeting other social media platforms is not wrong, but be attentive towards the amount of focus you give to them & the ROI you are getting in return.

Now that we are done with our planning & content creation, which has also been posted on social media platforms, it is time for re-evaluating our work & determining if they are generating expected results. Otherwise, it might be better to assess your strategy once again.

Content creation & marketing has been a core part of Marketing for a long time. But what many people get wrong when creating a content marketing strategy is Storytelling!

Storytelling can be the difference between marketing that is impactful and something which is just another Ad on social media.

Needless to say, storytelling is not the only thing that is important for content marketing, there are many things that one has to determine when creating their content marketing strategy. Target audience, brand voice, consistency, quality, brand colours, type of content etc. In this article we’ll look at the needs & ways to create a content marketing strategy that works best for your brand & business.

Generative A.I has undoubtedly increased the overall work efficiency in our day-to-day lives, especially in the creative industry. Its ability to provide a tremendous amount of data immediately in a single location has reduced the time it takes for research.

Content Marketing is no exception to this, with A.I you can boost your work efficiency  in many stages of your plan, such as:

• Automated Creation – Boosts efficiency & saves time by automating the creation of menial tasks.

• Personalisation – Being able to personalise your marketing efforts towards various audiences of different tastes, preferences & habits
• Predictive Analysis – Being able to clean, analyse & present large amounts of data much faster & efficiently.

These are just a few of the usages of A.I in the field of content marketing. With more & more advancements coming in the industry, A.I will become a core part of content marketing sooner or later.

Now that you are in the final stage of your content marketing efforts, it is now time to start evaluating the results that you’ve been driving so far. 

Understand that marketing is a never-ending process. This is because the factors that drive the market & the customers are always changing. Thus, making it detrimental to your content marketing efforts.

 Measure your content’s marketing effectiveness by:

• Tracking Engagement Metrics – Track the number of likes, comments, shares of your posts to check if they align with your target.

• Monitoring Website Traffic – Monitor the amount of traffic coming on your website, where they spend the most time & interaction details.

• Lead Generation – Perform CRO if the number of leads do not meet your goals. Identify beyond which step most people are choosing to give up & optimise from there. 

• Social Shares – If your goal is to get more shares, then curate your content in a manner which can make it shareable. Informational & entertaining posts get the most shares.

• SEO Performance – Regular keyword optimization & updating the SEO efforts on your website, social media & other online platforms is extremely important.

Your success can only be achieved once you’ve identified the various points of failures & worked around them again & again.