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Content Marketing is the ultimate inbound marketing tool for 21st-century consumers. Content Marketing can be defined as a technique of marketing valuable, relevant and consistent content. Content marketing is an inexpensive, effective, and safe marketing strategy.

1.Improved visibility on search engines.
2.Improved domain authority.
3.Increased traffic
4.Enhanced conversion potential
5.Improved brand reputation
6.Better customer and reader relationshipLet us understand the process of content marketing.

Like any good business strategy, content marketing begins with a good content marketing plan. It helps in giving direction to the campaign.

An effective content marketing strategy is one that is well planned.  For proper planning, it is essential to analyze the previous year’s performance and analyze the loopholes.

• The next step should be to identify your objectives. You should know clearly why you want to create content and market it.
• Next, you need to identify your target audience and make a plan to cater to their needs.
• After you have identified your target audience, you need to decide on the type of content. The most popular type of content is a blog post. You could even think of creating an e-book from a collection of the blog posts.
• The subsequent stage is that of content management. Content management entails content creation, content publication, and content analytics.
• The final stage is that of content creation and marketing. Maintaining a continuous flow of unique content can be quite challenging. But it is beneficial to create content that is valuable and stands out from the others.

Once you have made a content marketing plan, you need to start with its execution. In order to market the content, you need good quality content. Creation of good quality content is time-consuming and challenging. However, the impact of quality content cannot be stressed enough. As more and more businessmen are becoming aware of the potential of content marketing, the competition is only increasing.

Everyone wants high-quality content with minimum stress. This can be achieved through a content marketing system that runs on autopilot.

Structure and Organize Your Campaign
You should have a clear game plan and should include all your team members in it. A useful tool is an online collaborative content calendar. This enables you and your team to:

• Plan and coordinate the content.
• Edit it so that it can viewed in real time.
• Keep track of deadlines.
• Monitor progress from conception to completion.

Brainstorming
You should always be on a lookout to offer something new in terms of content marketing to your clients. Some common methods are white papers, blog posts and videos. You can consider having a number of idea generation resources for using.

Creation of Content
This is the most demanding stage. But most of the successful firms are creating quality content by outsourcing. Content writing work is given to freelancers. This reduces the time and efforts of the businessman.

Curation of Content
It implies sorting through vast amounts of content on the web and selecting information relevant to a specific theme. After this, it is presented in a meaningful and organized manner around the theme.

Automated Posting
The content may need to be posted on multiple channels. This can be quite time-consuming. Now there are tools for automatic posting which just require a few clicks.

After a content marketing campaign is generated, the next step is content marketing.

Research shows that growth of firms that generated leads online was much faster than those that generated them through traditional marketing methods. Research has proved that if a 40% threshold level of lead generation was done online, a firm would grow four times faster.

The method to generate leads through online methods is content marketing. There are five basic tools used in content marketing. They are:

Company Website
A company’s website is its most powerful marketing resource. It has the potential to leverage both the tools used by the high growth firms namely blogging and SEO. Unfortunately, most Companies don’t pay enough attention to this marketing technique.

A website can be optimized for lead generation. For this, the features of its content should be:

• Web page content should be static
  This is information about the Company on the home page. This content does not change frequently. But, it is recommended to refresh the content biannually. Website content should be made easily accessible to users by employing SEO techniques.
• Stock Educational content
  These are long, heavy pieces which require more resources for their generation.
• Flow Educational content
  These are precise content which employ SEO practices so that they can be easily accessed by users through search engines or social media. Blogging is one of the most powerful techniques to increase the web traffic and leads.

Social Media Marketing
One of the most effective content marketing tools is social media. Social media can be used to connect with clients, prospects and industry peers. An effective way to use social media is by following a rule of the thumb, 4:1. This rule implies sharing four pieces of someone else’s content to every 1 piece of your own. This is because social media is a highly reciprocal online society. It is not exactly suitable for direct sales. Therefore, it is beneficial to post other people’s content along with your own.

Email Marketing
It is a popular content marketing tool used by high growth firms. Email marketing is done by cultivating a target list of contacts and emailing them educational content and offers on a periodic basis. However, the technique works in conjunction with other content marketing methods. For instance, if someone finds your website through an informative blog post. They may follow the blog for a few weeks and notice a whitepaper, they may want to read. They may provide you their E-mail address in exchange for the whitepaper. Once you have their E-mail address, you can provide them informative E-mails about your products/ services or offers.

Web Analytics
Web analytics such as Google Analytics is basically the unseen skeleton of data behind other content marketing techniques. These tools enable you to monitor visitor activity on your website. These activities may be visits, downloads, etc. These tools provide a feedback of the success of the content marketing strategy and help you in moving forward.

Stock Content
Stock content refers to educational content that can be downloaded from your website or anywhere else. Stock content could be whitepapers, e-books, articles, etc. Some content marketing firms convert digital content into paperback books and distribute them to clients, prospects and industry peers. The benefits of Stock content are multifold. They give you a reputation of being a thought leader. Your audience is ready to exchange the E-mail address for stock content and this helps in E-mail marketing.

It is necessary to promote the content using proper means. Content promotion is a part of content marketing. For effective content promotion, selection of a suitable platform is vital. This ensures that your content reaches the target market. Content promotion can be done through distribution platforms that create lower traffic costs compared to advertising. Content distribution platforms can be earned or paid.

Posts Sponsored by Facebook:

Facebook has accumulated enormous information about its users. This gives it an advantage over others as a distribution platform. Brands and publishers who utilize this platform can be confident that they will reach the right audience. Facebook sponsored posts can be re-shared. If an article goes viral on Facebook it will have a very wide reach. It is one of the least expensive methods of achieving maximum returns.

Posts Sponsored by LinkedIn:
This is the best platform if you want to cater to specific clients. Since LinkedIn is a network for professionals and executives, it is a platform for connecting to esteemed audiences. You can connect with your specific target audience by applying necessary filters. This platform aims at getting you quality clicks rather than quantity clicks.

Outbrain:
Other than social media networks, Outbrain is the most popular and reliable content distribution platforms. It has premium publishing partners such as Time, CNN, ESPN, and Slate, etc. It exercises complete control over the quality. This is done by recommending only authentic content and banning dubious content.

Promoted Tweets:
Promoting tweets works as a powerful tool for promotion in the media industry. Promoted tweets are clearly labeled in a manner that they smoothly blend with the accompanying content.

Taboola:
This is a platform for content recommendation. Content displayed could be in the form of articles, videos, slideshows, etc. It can be from within the site or through external agencies such as advertisers and publishers. Content may be displayed through discovery widgets, in-stream native ads or hybrids.

Therefore, we can see that content marketing is a field that is emerging as a specialized field. Good content creation and marketing have far-reaching effects on the success of a business. If you approach content marketing in a logical manner, you will succeed in going ahead of the competition.