Mastering Content Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for 2021

“Content is king” is a mantra that marketers have invoked for the past few years—and for good reason. Content marketing is a new breed of marketing designed to work around the inherent flaws in conventional advertising; it’s the driving force behind digital marketing channels such as SEO and social media. It’s not a stretch to say content marketing is the key to a successful digital marketing strategy.

If you’re new to content marketing, or not sure where to start, take heart. You need to have fresh ideas. This primer will walk you through content marketing in 2021 and give you concrete steps to implement a new content strategy or improve the one you already have—no matter your budget or the size of your marketing team. Ready to begin?

What Is Content Marketing?

The Content Marketing Institute gives this rather formal definition:

“Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

More simply, content marketing provides prospects and customers with interesting and useful information that answers questions, addresses needs, or engages emotions to help your business meet its marketing goals. Content marketing is a non-pushy, authentic way to establish relationships and share your brand’s story.

The concept has been with us for decades, actually. In the old days, a brand like Nestle might print a recipe or two on the back of a package of chocolate chips or put an ad in a magazine featuring fool-proof fudge. Today, they’ll publish an interview with a chocolatier on their blog, use a Pinterest board to share recipes and tips, put cooking demonstrations and how-to videos on their YouTube channel, and run a holiday cookie photo contest on Instagram. The concept is the same, it’s the tactics that evolve.

Here are some eye-popping content marketing stats:

• 92% of businesses engage in content marketing.
• 70% of marketers plan to increase their content creation this year.
• The average company spends 28% of its overall marketing budget on content marketing; the most effective marketers spend 37% on content.
• 55% of businesses plan to increase their content marketing budget this year.

No matter what business you’re in, you need content marketing in order to compete.

Defining Your Objectives

What do you want your content to accomplish for your business? Defining your objectives helps you align your content strategy to help you achieve them. Here are just a few examples:

• Establish thought leadership to build credibility, respect, and influence in your industry
• Generate new leads and prospects for sales and marketing
• Create awareness of, and interest in, your products or services
• Build and/or improve public opinion about your business and products
• Develop a large following of friends and fans who engage with your brand on social media

From here, you’ll decide on how content marketing will fit into your overall marketing scheme. A sample strategy for building paid memberships might be:

Newsletter → Blog Post→ Social Media⇒ Paid Membership Site

A strategy to drive B2B product sales might look more like this:

Journal Article→ White Paper→ Case Studies→ Product Demo⇒ Sales/Estimate/Quote

An effective strategy usually combines several content tactics:

• blog posts
• video demos
• podcasts
• articles
• newsletters
• white papers
• case studies
• infographics
• ebooks
• webinars
• interviews

As you craft your strategy, keep in mind the difficulty factor in creating each type of content, how it fits with your overall objectives, and if your target audience is receptive to information in that format.

Set SMART Content Marketing Goals

Every piece of content you publish should be aligned to a particular marketing goal, and those goals should be SMART:

S – Specific (It’s attached to a particular need or objective.)

M – Measurable (You have objective, not subjective, metrics.)

A – Attainable (You can realistically expect to achieve it or at least come pretty close.)

R – Relevant (It furthers an overall business objective.)

T – Time-bound (You have a predetermined deadline or end-date.)

Avoid vanity metrics such as “likes” and retweets; in themselves, they aren’t aligned with your marketing goals. Think in concrete terms like traffic, leads, conversions, sales—objectives shared across multiple teams throughout the organization.

Develop a Plan for Content Creation and Execution

Once you know the type of content you want to publish, you need to develop a plan to create it. It’s not enough to jot down a rough outline and some notes; the most effective content marketers report having a documented content plan that is shared across the organization and for which they are accountable. Take the time to complete a step-by-step roadmap that enables you to monitor your efforts and track each piece of content throughout its lifecycle.

Your plan should answer the following questions:

➤How often will you publish content? For some businesses, this may mean daily blog posts, twice daily social media updates, a weekly podcast, and a monthly video tutorial. Others might need a steady stream of lead magnets (e-books, white papers, etc.) and a couple of fairly evergreen product demos.

When you’ve hammered out your content needs, plug them into a content calendar you can share with your marketing team. That way, everyone is on the same page, deadlines don’t get missed, and you avoid duplication of effort.

➤Who is responsible for content ideas? If you’re pushing out a steady stream of content, you’ll need an equally steady stream of content ideas. In most cases, the marketing department does all the brainstorming, but this excludes some excellent sources of content ideas.

Your customer service manager, for example, could give you some useful ideas for a Q&A to address the most common questions the department handles, or a how-to video to solve a persistent challenge. Maybe your tech guru could write a monthly rant or product review. The point is not to limit ideation to a small team of marketers, but to cultivate ideas throughout the organization. Just be sure that someone has final editorial control so that your content ideas align with your marketing goals.

One thing to consider: In many cases, it’s helpful to write a creative brief for each piece of content, especially if you’re using multiple creatives or freelancers along

However, once you move into high-value assets such as white papers, case studies, and product demos, input and approval from other departments is essential. For these complex assets, write up a chain of command and get sign-off from relevant department heads. Have a process in place to resolve the inevitable differences of opinion and establish a single person as the final authority for the finished piece.

Identifying Your Audience

One of the reasons content marketing is effective is because it speaks to readers as individuals—if you’re writing content to address a group of people, you’re doing it wrong. To write really effective content, you need to identify exactly who it is you’re writing to, at a very granular, nitty-gritty level. At this point, it’s helpful to develop an avatar, or persona, who represents your target audience; this is the person you’ll write your content for. Start with demographics:

• age
• gender
• educational level
• income
• occupation
• family status and/or size
• geographic location

Then add in intangibles:

• values
• personality traits
• lifestyle choices
• hobbies and interests

Once you’ve identified an ideal representative of your target audience, your avatar, give it a name and address all your content to him or her. Your avatar is not the same as your buyer persona; your avatar will help you write more focused, engaging content that advances your marketing goals.

Next, you’ll need to find out where your target audience lives online. Here’s a handy infographic with key demographics for the popular social media sites; you can also use paid services like Forrester to help you track the social behaviors of your own customers so you know exactly where they go for content online. This will shape your content creation choices. 

Matching Content to Your Marketing Funnel

Image via Flickr

Most marketers have some version of the digital marketing funnel that covers the four basics: Awareness/discovery, consideration/acquisition, conversion/transaction, relationship/retention. The beauty of content marketing is that it works at every level, from top to bottom.

Awareness/Discovery

Goals: Educating people, generating interest, indirect customer acquisition.

At this stage, content marketing is about understanding what customers are interested in and want to know, and delivering that information in a manner that delights them or piques their curiosity. It’s less about you (and your brand) and more about them. Educational content, viral content, shareable content—big wins at this stage of content marketing.

Content tactics:

• blog posts
• quizzes, games, tools, calculators
• infographics
• videos
• newsletters
• how-tos and in-depth guides
• podcasts and webinars
• ebooks

Real-world example:

A pet supply shop specializing in premium organic pet foods and supplements publishes a quiz about common ingredients in commercial pet food on its blog and promotes it on its Facebook page, posts photos and a recipe for homemade dog treats on Pinterest, and records an interview with a local vet about optimal nutrition for older dogs for its monthly podcast.

Consideration/Acquisition

Goals: Building trust, offering solutions, direct customer acquisition.

At this point, you are highlighting problems your prospects and customers might have and offer your products and services as trustworthy solutions. At this stage, you want to offer information that helps differentiate you from your competitors and answers questions about how you can solve their problems. You’re not really selling at this point, but you are positioning your brand.

Content tactics:

• case studies
• product descriptions and data sheets
• how-to guides featuring your product or service
• product demos and videos
• white papers
• ROI calculators

Real-world example:

A residential heating and air conditioning company creates an in-depth guide showing homeowners how to save money on energy costs. One section details the importance of having air ducts professionally sealed, a service the company offers. They offer the guide on their company website and promote it in their newsletter, blog, and on social media.

Conversion/Transaction

Goals: Communicating your unique value proposition, getting prospects/customers to take a desired action.

Leads at this point in the funnel are ready to pull the trigger, they just need a little nudge—something that justifies and rationalizes the decision in their mind. Now is the time to pull out the stops in your sales pitch with clear copy that emphasizes your USP.

Content tactics:

• testimonials
• product reviews
• product comparisons
• estimates/quotes
• ROI calculators
• detailed product descriptions

Real-world example:

A software company creates a matrix comparing the features of competing products in its particular market niche. It also produces a series of video testimonials from companies of varying sizes current

Content Type	Approval Required
Blog posts, social media updates, newsletters, landing pages	Marketing department
White papers, case studies, product demos	Input and approval from other departments

Format

Content Idea	Platform
Long-form article about gluten-free baking alternatives to wheat flour	Newsletter or blog post
Recipe for gluten-free hazelnut torte	Pinterest
Infographic	Facebook and Twitter

Don’t forget that some consumers prefer visual content; Google+ hangouts, Slideshare presentations, screencasting are all interesting alternatives to written pieces.

Google News is a bit forward thinking. First, it covers ALL searchable topics and will show you the latest news piece and even blog posts. Second, not all posts make it to Google news. They only show high-quality and reputable websites.

Feature	Google News
Coverage	All searchable topics
Content Type	Latest news pieces and blog posts
Quality	High-quality and reputable websites only

You probably know where I’m going with this: Use Google News to find out what the best of the best are talking about. From there, you’ll surely get a topic you can build on using your own perspective.

Of course, if your niche is politics or sports, you might get good ideas from the frontpage of Google News. If you’re from a very targeted niche though, you need to utilize Google News’ robust search algorithm.