Positioning of
the brand
(Brand development / strategic goal )
Content Marketing
"Content is king!" This sentence can be found everywhere if you want to inform yourself about content. But why? Because it's true at the moment. Without content you can't reach customers these days. Content is what you offer on your website - be it texts, videos, whitepapers, blog articles, book tips, e-books, podcasts, etc. - and it's all there. All that is available to the visitor either statically on the page or as downloadable content is content. However, you can also include "rented content", such as commercials, posters or ads. However, custom content on websites is becoming more and more important (rented content is losing relevance), as customers and prospects are now more and more informed about the Internet and ignore advertising that is forced on them. They want to decide for themselves when and how they want to inform themselves about new products. Content, however, is no longer only about quantity, but also about quality. A good content strategy (still more to be found on Google under the english search term content strategy) ensures that good content is created, which at the same time also ensures a good placement on Google. The content strategy also takes care of which content is best presented and how, i.e. as static text, video, podcast, whitepaper, etc. Responsible for good content is the so-called content manager. This position can be understood as editor-in-chief of the content strategy. A good content management makes the difference between page 2 (nobody sees you) and page 1 at Google.
This is exactly where content marketing comes into play. It is a collective term for marketing formats that create and disseminate content to appeal to people, build trust, and influence their opinions and behavior. It is important to keep in mind that the creation of content is not about your own business and products, but about the potential CUSTOMER. What moves them, what interests them, what problems do they have? Furthermore, content marketing is the art of winning and retaining customers by providing high-quality information. For example, content is distributed on the company's website, blogs, vlogs and social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook. Content is also made available in the form of eBooks, white papers, webinars, videos and newsletters. It is important that the provision of offers on one's own media is more effective than on "rented media" (e.g. poster advertising, television spots). The contents must reach the customer, if he/she looks for it and is thus ready for the admission. The first goal is to reach a certain target group and to retain it permanently. Ultimately, the customer should be convinced of the purchase through the creation of added value and react profitably to the content for the company. Content marketing is an ongoing process that should be integrated into the overall marketing strategy.
describes a communication strategy to increase awareness among the desired target group, to improve the image or to win new customers by means of useful but not advertising information. The potential customer should not be immediately urged to buy a product.
The task there is to master is to reach the customers via these channels. Advertising through cold calling, brochures, posters and commercials alone no longer achieves satisfactory results. Customers no longer want to be bombarded with content, but want to find the right content for themselves. Let the customers find you! Not only do you have customers who want to interact with you, but you also create trust more quickly.
Content marketing can pursue short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals include, for example, generating a higher reach, generating leads or optimizing the conversion rate. Long-term goals include: strengthening brand awareness, social proofing, thought leadership, community building, and ultimately customer acquisition and retention.
(Brand development / strategic goal )
(tactical target)
(strategic objective)
Because a good and constant content marketing increases your traffic, you are more perceived as a brand, and because it strengthens the trust in your company and your brand. You can use content marketing to generate more leads, optimize your conversion rate and retain your customers over the long term.
A successful content marketing strategy can only be created if the individual components are properly handled and administered. These include
A buyer persona can be a fictitious or real personal description of your customers. It is important that they have different categories that represent their different customer types. The buyer persona concept helps you to target marketing campaigns more precisely to your potential customers. In content marketing, they represent the most important component. The more precise you are here, the more goal-oriented you can work and the greater your success will be.
Buyer personas show you how different potential customers "tick". You get an insight into how, when and why potential customers make their purchase decisions. Use these insights throughout your company to respond to customer needs.
With a buyer persona profile you clarify the characteristics of an ideal customer. With several buyer personas you cover the various ideal customer profiles of your target customers.
The careful creation of buyer personas is a complex and dynamic process with thorough research and analysis. Data collection for a buyer persona includes e.g. website analysis, user profiles, public studies, but above all personal interviews with your customers and prospects. The results are customer profiles in the form of profiles, which should be valid over a longer period of time and apply company-wide.
If, for example, your company sells products or services to medium-sized companies, the managing director of such a company could be an important buyer persona for your company. Or do you sell software? Then perhaps it is the IT manager in a company. Depending on your business model, one or two buyer personas can be sufficient, but it can also be ten or 20.
If you are inexperienced in creating buyer personas, start with the most important ones and create the others bit by bit.
In content marketing, it is important to understand your customers and, first and foremost, to solve their problems. Your product or service is in the background! Do not use the first step of content marketing as an advertising platform for yourself, but as consulting for potential customers. This creates trust and the customers are happy to turn to you again - with a purchase request. Your content must fit the respective customers in their different phases:
Customers/visitors in this phase are often not (yet) looking for a product/service. They are looking for help and information, but also entertainment. It's your job to deliver content that will ensure that customers know about you, trust you and enjoy coming back.
If the customers have arrived in this phase, you have managed to make your company present to the customers. The customers now start to actively search for you and your products. For customers in this phase you can now create content that puts you and your products or services more in the foreground and supports your customers in their research.
From now on customers are ready to make a purchase. Content in this phase can present your product as a solution to the customers' problem. Demos, comparisons with other brands and user reviews are appropriate here.
Congratulations. You have won a new customer. But you can't stop creating content now. Customers who have chosen you have done so because they trust you as a consultant and source. Maintain that status. For customers in this phase, accurate email marketing and the presentation of new solutions for different problems is suitable.
Content marketing is based on your customers finding you. The most used search engine in the world is Google. However, in order to be found on Google and not end up on the second page (very few people look at search results beyond the first page), you need to make your content attractive to Google. There are whole books and courses on how to optimize your website for search engines, but you don't have to be an expert to get started. There are providers who will find the most important keywords for you and make them available to you. But you can also use Google Analytics or websites like Keywordtool.io and an Excel spreadsheet. Take a look at which terms are frequently searched in connection with your industry, products or services.
Google suggest or the websites and blogs of similar providers will help you find out which terms are being searched for that you haven't thought about. The more frequently searched terms appear in your content, the better you 'rank' in Google. But resist the temptation to create content that is only search engine optimized and bristles with search terms but is almost unreadable. It's important to find the right balance between creating the right number of terms and creating readable content that really helps your customers. In connection with the key word optimization there is also the so-called click rate. Google analyzes how often a visitor clicked on your page and how long he/she stayed there or whether he/she pressed the back button in the browser. The more often this happens, the worse your rank will be. Quality over quantity is the motto.
The creation of content for your content marketing strategy can quickly become confusing. So that you, your employees and the external participants always know what is next, has to be done and is always up-to-date, it is advisable to keep an editorial calendar. In this calendar you enter all pages that are to be created; all blog posts that are planned; all campaigns that are pending; and more. Not only does the calendar help everyone know what needs to be done, but it also allows you to keep track and stay true to your brand voice.
Blog posts or social media posts always keep your customers informed about these topics that represent your brand or need lasting solutions.
This area is for expert reports or guest contributions.
They deal with solutions for problems or with the presentation of topics that are not too specific, but can help many customers in general. They always link to corresponding topics or specific solutions.
These should generate further interest in you - wherever possible.
Before you start creating new content, it is important that you analyze and evaluate your existing content. This task is performed by the content auditor. The content auditor keeps track of the content that has already been created and the need for new material.
Finding out who should be responsible for creating your content can be a difficult task. As a first point of contact, however, we recommend your own employees. Encourage them to create blog entries on topics they find interesting and important. It doesn't just have to be marketing or sales people, employees from all areas can make valuable contributions and become content creators. This creates authenticity and trust. Your employees are especially important for long-term, constant contributions.
However, you cannot always do everything that content marketing requires. Blog posts of which you have at most one new post created per day are best created by your own employees. For campaigns and brand related content, or thought leadership projects, it usually makes sense to hire professional external experts. Based on your experience, they can create specific contributions that are topic-related and yet search engine optimized.
Guest contributions from employees of other companies can also be valuable. You not only relieve your own team, but also show that you are cooperative. In addition, your customers can come to you for information for which you are not an expert, but know experts. This in turn creates trust.
Satisfied or enthusiastic customers are also a good source for posts such as blog posts. This is so-called 'user generated content' and an important part of content marketing. User generated content catapults you forward because it is the most authentic and trustworthy content you can provide. If customers want to be involved for you and with you, it shows other prospects that you are worth researching further. There is also a sense of community that others want to join.
It's important that everyone knows what your brand or company stands for and that the contributions are expressed in a coherent language. This does not mean the written style, but the message to be conveyed and the desire to appeal to customers at different stages.
The first step to content marketing is not writing informative texts and does not end with their publication. But with five steps you manage to start and execute a successful campaign. In the following we go through all five steps so that you know exactly what to do and when.
As with any other campaign, the first question you need to ask yourself is: "What do I want to achieve with this campaign? Do you want more reputation for your brand, company or product? Do you want new customers? Do you want to keep customers? Set yourself apart from your competitors? First of all, answer this question before you even use one thought for the actual measures. It is the starting point for all further steps, and with every next step, with every content you create (or have created), you must be able to relate to your goals.
Can content creation start after you have defined your goals? Not quite yet. Before you start creating content, you need to develop a strategy to define, create, and distribute the content.
Of course, you can also plan for more steps. It all depends on how much you integrate content creation into your work processes in general and how many campaigns you run. The more you engage with it and the more successful campaigns you have created, the smoother the work steps become and the better you know what you value in your company.
Content marketing is an important tool to be successful in modern marketing. With the help of a good content marketing strategy and campaign you can achieve a lot and increase your visibility in the abundance of offers on the internet significantly. However, content marketing on its own has its limits. To stand out in the flood of content (keyword content shock), you need a new approach. The marketing manager 2.0 knows this and integrates his content marketing strategy into his inbound marketing and his thought leadership marketing. The content manager 2.0 places its customers in the foreground and thus creates trust.
Once you have assigned all the tasks and resources, it's time to create your editorial calendar. In it, you record which content is to be created and when and where it is to be published. In addition, you can also record who is dedicated to which topic so that collaborations can take place.
It is crucial that you communicate with your content creator. At all times, your content creators need to know which topics are current, which are a current campaign or a permanent topic, what others are working on, and what deadlines exist. You also need to keep up to date with user-generated content. Avoid too many duplications on the same channel (e.g. blog). Also make sure that the right content creators create content that is targeted to the different visitor phases.
There are, of course, many different approaches to content creation; you will probably have to try and make a mistake to find out which variants work best for you and your business. You can create teams that brainstorm to find the right content and evaluate how it will be published. Alternatively, your content manager, in collaboration with the content auditor, can create a plan that is expressed in the editorial calendar and adhered to by your content creator. You can also give your creator free rein and search for your topics yourself. This is most recommended for blog posts of your employees. The most important thing is that, as mentioned above, they have well integrated communication so that everyone involved knows what is being worked on.
Of course, creating content alone is not everything. The best content doesn't help you much if it doesn't reach anyone. Producing high quality content is just as important as promoting it. Make your content marketing strategy part of your marketing. Decide on the most suitable channels for you to promote your content in the best possible way. A good combination of search engine optimization/marketing and social media, as well as "rented media" often achieves the best results. Adapt your content promotion to the different phases of your prospective customers/customers. E-mail marketing, for example, does not work in the initial phase, but achieves your purpose very well in the loyal phase. Another source you can use to promote your content is your loyal customers and influencers, as well as external content creators. Word of Mouth is one of the most effective ways to advertise today. Your clients and also external content creators often have a large network for which they serve as trustworthy consultants and can recommend you to their network. This creates trust and interest among your potential customers.
After the campaign is before the campaign. To get the most out of your content marketing campaigns, you need to accurately analyze how successful you are. Take a look at how many customers you have won with the last campaign through all phases. Where did potential customers jump off? What were the reasons? You can only optimize your campaigns if you know why customers ultimately decided in favour of you and against you. Don't be afraid to learn from your mistakes. Likewise, you will only know which internal processes you still have to work on after a campaign has been carried out. Where have you had problems or stalled? Which departments worked well together, which need more support? Which content creators delivered the most successful content and why was it so successful? You need to consider all indicators to evolve. Always make small changes and see if it increases your success or not. If you make too big changes all at once, you will find it difficult to understand which factors were responsible for the success or failure. Always remember: Content marketing is not a means to quickly get many customers, but only works over time! But the customers you win through content marketing are customers you have in the long run.
Inbound marketing is the tool to be found by customers and to guide customers through the different phases (the so-called "funnel"). With a combination of inbound marketing and content marketing, you can achieve the greatest possible reach. You combine traditional and modern advertising as well as traditional and modern customer acquisition and thus create the best basis for a successful path into the future for you and your company.
As a thought leader you determine the market, because as a thought leader you are not one of many, but the contact person for customers and interested parties. Content marketing and thought leadership marketing can help you establish yourself as more than just an expert in a field. Customers will immediately associate the product/service with you, no matter which provider. This is only possible if content marketing and thought leadership work hand in hand.
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