Content Marketing

Content Creation in Marketing: What It Is and Getting Started

CopyPress

November 2, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

Creating content for your marketing campaign supports your business in numerous ways. Not only does it allow you to increase your brand awareness, but it keeps your business competitive in online markets. Think about it: just about every successful business is doing some form of content creation in marketing. And if your business isn’t, it may need to catch up. Find out what you need to know about content creation in marketing and how to do it successfully in this guide:

• What Is Content Creation in Marketing?
• Benefits of Content Creation in Marketing
• Types of Content Creation in Marketing
• How To Create Content For Your Brand
• What To Do With Your Content After Creation

What Is Content Creation in Marketing?

Image via iStock by golubovy

Content creation in marketing is the act of planning and developing content to attract people to your business’s website and to generate lead conversions. Content creation in marketing includes things like blogs, videos, articles, and eBooks. These pieces of content help to improve the brand awareness of your company by talking about topics that relate to your industry. These topics often help your audience solve a problem or challenge that they’re currently facing while simultaneously directing them to your products and services.

Read more: Enterprise SEO Content Creation: Everything You Need to Know

Benefits of Content Creation in Marketing

There are several benefits to content creation in marketing, including:

Building Brand Awareness

As mentioned, increasing brand awareness is one of the biggest benefits of content creation in a marketing campaign. That’s because when you develop content that ranks well on search engines or generates more social media engagement, more people will see it. That means that more people will learn about your brand and what you offer. The more people who know about your brand, the easier time you’ll have attracting your target audience and building your customer base.

Increasing Organic Traffic

As you develop content for the web, your search engine ranking can rise and increase organic traffic. This traffic helps bring more people to your site, further developing your brand awareness. It also helps bring your audience into the next stage of the buyer’s journey. This creates more opportunities for you to convert them into customers, generate leads, and increase your sales.

Attracting Quality Leads

Quality leads are people more likely to purchase something from your company, compared to normal leads. You generate quality leads by attracting people from your target audience, who you know could benefit most from your products or services. By targeting a specific audience, you know that people who give you their email address or sign up for a free service might be more willing to talk with your sales department or consider buying your products.

Types of Content Creation in Marketing

Here are some of the most common types of content you can create for your marketing campaign:

• Blogs: Writing promotional blog articles consists of shorter content that generally talks about trending topics in your business industry or niche market. Businesses often use blogs to add their own perspective and unique voice to a current problem or challenge their audiences might be facing.

• Educational articles: Educational articles, compared to blogs, are longer forms of content that give solutions to their audience’s challenges or inform them on different industry topics. These articles are longer because they talk about the subject in-depth and provide a lot of useful information to their readers.

• EBooks: An eBook is a lot like an educational article in length but can range in topic, tone, and style. Most often, companies use eye-catching designs and graphics when creating eBooks to engage with audiences. Then, they put them behind a sign-up wall to create a lead-generation tool for their website.

• White papers: White papers are another type of long-form, written content that talks about an industry problem or challenge and provide a viable solution. The main difference between white papers and educational articles is that white papers don’t talk about a company’s products or services.

• Infographics: Infographics include images that compile data, graphs, and information to give readers a one-stop shop for useful information. This data is organized in an eye-catching and appealing way, making infographics for businesses valuable assets for social media marketing.
• Videos: Video content is pretty broad and can talk about a range of subjects. Some companies might use videos to give their audience tutorials on their products while others might use them to talk about case studies and share testimonials from past clients.

Related: Types of Copy and What To Use For Your Business

How To Create Content For Your Brand

Here’s a list of steps to help you start developing content for your marketing campaign:

1. Develop Goals

Before developing content for your site, it’s important to understand the goals that you’re trying to accomplish. Though you want your content to be effective in multiple areas of your marketing campaign, picking one specific area to improve can help you monitor its effectiveness more easily. It can also help you better understand what type of content to produce to achieve that goal. For example, let’s say you’re trying to increase your search engine ranking. If that’s the case, blogs or educational articles might be better than video content or infographics.

When creating goals, it’s important to make SMART goals. Essentially, you want a specific goal you can actually achieve in a set amount of time. Increasing your organic traffic by 200% in a week isn’t exactly realistic. But increasing your organic traffic by 20% over two months is something that might be achievable for your team.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Understanding your target audience and what content they want to see is crucial for the success of your marketing campaign. If you generate content that doesn’t relate to your industry or the struggles of your readers, it’s not going to do much for your campaign’s goals. A great way to get to know your target audience is by developing an audience profile. This is a fictional representation of your audience that lists information about them so you can create content that interests them.

Start by listing out what your audience looks like. This includes their demographics, like age and gender, as well as where they may live and work. Next, think about their interests. What do they like to do? Do they have any hobbies? Do they like certain movies or book genres? Think about the challenges or issues they might be trying to solve. Then position your brand as the solution.

For example, if you sell long-lasting, high-powered flashlights, your audience might worry about flashlights not working during an emergency. Understanding this, your team can create content that highlights how your brand solves this issue.

Finally, take a look at where your audience might look for content. Do they favor social media? Do they prefer to find their content by searching for it manually? Once you know who your audience is and where they like to hang out, planning your business’s content production will be much simpler.

Read more: How To Find a Build a Relationship with Your Target Audience

3. Research Keywords

Researching keywords is a great way to build a content campaign that resonates with your target audience. You can easily start your keyword research with Google. Type in a few keywords that are relevant to your industry and look at things like the “people also ask” section. This section provides tons of information on other keywords or questions your audience is searching for. It’s also helpful to use research tools, like Ahrefs and Semrush to understand other keywords relevant to your audience and, more importantly, their competition.

If a keyword has a lot of competition, it might not be the best one to target. That’s because other businesses and websites with more authority are already targeting those keywords. When looking at Ahrefs and Semrush, it’s helpful to target keywords with high traffic, but low competition. These keywords can help you soar to the top of the search engine results page and effectively grab your audience’s attention.

4. Analyze Competitors

Next to researching keywords, it’s also crucial to analyze your competitors. Knowing what type of content your competitors are creating can help you better understand what interests your target audience and it can help you find gaps in your content marketing strategy. For example, if all your competitors are creating educational articles, it might be beneficial for you to start an educational article series as well. It’s possible that your audience might expect it or look for it from brands in your industry.

To conduct competitor research, start by looking through the competing content. What types of content are competitors producing, and how do audiences engage with it? Look at the rankings for competitor content and note any that consistently appears in the top search results. By compiling this information, you’ll have a better idea of where to target your content creation and marketing efforts.

And if you’re looking for a way to dig into the insights right away, CopyPress has a content marketing analysis tool that compares your content with your top three competitors. Find content partnership opportunities and review the gaps in your current content strategy so you can improve these areas and achieve the results you want.

5. Know Your Style

Creating a style guide is important for your business because it creates a cohesive voice that your audience can come to know and expect from your brand. Is your brand going to be humorous and casual or polished and professional? Style guides are documents that outline the format of your content and other important details, like how often you mention your products or services or link to relates pages on your site. Advertising your brand should definitely be a part of content creation in marketing, but it’s important to avoid being overbearing about it.

While promoting products and services is ultimately the goal, you always want to ask yourself: does it give your audience value? Your audience will always ask, “What’s in it for me?” And if people don’t find your brand’s content valuable, they’ll click away. The same can be said for content that’s too ad-heavy. You want to entice audiences with calls to action, but don’t overdo it.

Read more: What Is a Style Guide?

5. Develop a Creation Process

Now that you have a better understanding of what type of content you want to create, it’s time to develop a content creation process. Some factors to consider at this stage often include:

• When to publish and distribute content
• How often to publish content
• Who gets assigned within each process of content creation

It’s helpful to have a content calendar for when you want to post content to make sure you’re posting frequently and consistently. Posting consistently helps to build your brand awareness and increases your audience’s satisfaction because they know your brand will always have something to offer them. But creating a calendar is just the beginning. Who’s creating your content? And how do you know it’s high quality?

Writing the content yourself is fine, it allows you to maintain quality control over it and ensure your content is compelling. But that can take a lot of time and resources away from other areas of your business. So, you might look at hiring a freelancer. Unfortunately, with freelance writers, it can be a hit-or-miss situation. They might have the skills and experience, sure. But will they be able to write in your brand’s voice? And what if you have to hire multiple freelancers who create wildly different articles and blogs?

Honestly, this last scenario can create an inconsistent experience for your audience. The best options you have for content creation in marketing give you two approaches: hiring and working with an in-house team or outsourcing professional content creation to marketing experts, like CopyPress.

6. Analyze Performance and Revise

Once you start creating content, it’s important to monitor its performance and compare it with your content marketing goals. Is your campaign on its way to reaching key objectives? Or do you need to make adjustments? For example, let’s say your goal is to increase organic traffic by 30% in three months. This equals an increase in traffic by 10% every month. If the first month only increases traffic by 5%, you might need to alter your content plan in order to reach your goal in time.

But remember: with content creation in marketing, results can take time. Checking your performance every hour or every day isn’t going to tell you what you need to do. Instead, try checking every other week or every month and look at your averages. This can give you a much more accurate and helpful representation of how your content is performing.

Related: Marketing Performance Measurement After a Google Penalty

What To Do With Your Content After Creation

So you successfully integrated content creation in marketing, but what do you do with the content after completion? Think about it. How do you plan to promote content, engage with audiences, and generate leads? It’s not as easy as you think. Without an understanding of the right content marketing techniques, content promotion can be difficult to keep up with.

Luckily, there are experts, like CopyPress, who can help. Our team of digital content strategists and SEO experts can help with content creation for your marketing plan. Get started with a strategy call and find out how you can use content marketing to get the results you want.

CopyPress

November 2, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)