Content marketing is one of the fastest growing segments of any business marketing strategy, and with good reason. Content marketing allows you to connect, acquire, engage, and most importantly retain prospective customers by becoming a reliable source of credible, educational, or entertaining information.
But how do you establish that reputation and what steps do you need to take to reach your target audience? Answers to these questions and many more are acquired with helpful resources that provide data-driven insights to support your overall marketing goals.
What are these resources?
You may have heard of the term content marketing software, a technological platform that allows you to establish workflow, publish fresh content, distribute to the proper channels, and measure the effectiveness of your work. By using software, you can establish a step by step content marketing plan that optimizes your existing work and increases your brand’s ROI.
Software helps you navigate the content marketing lifecycle, a five step process to achieve your brand’s objectives with content. These steps involve:
- Establishing a plan for content
- Deciding what to create
- Determining where to distribute your published work
- Measuring the effectiveness of your efforts
- Optimizing your results for even greater return in the future
When you successfully navigate the cycle, you will provide real value to your target audience.
What about the Customer Lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle is a path that many people follow on the road to becoming loyal customers. When a person learns about your brand, they begin as suspects who are curious about the services and the value provided by you and your team. The cycle proceeds as follows:
- Suspects become Prospects
- Prospects become Customers
- Customers become Advocates
Software can help you curate content that addresses the needs of potential clientele at the various stages of the customer lifecycle. People will engage with your brand in different ways depending on where they are within the cycle. The right data platform provides you with insights into your target audience so that you can make smart content marketing decisions.
How Do You Get Noticed By People?
The internet is overflowing with information. It is very challenging for you to stand out from the crowd and even more challenging to reach the types of people that will make your efforts a success. On top of that, people don’t want to dig deep for the information they seek. They want to find reliable, trustworthy brands that can provide solutions to any number of queries.
A content marketing strategy, if executed successfully, will bring your audience to you. Using insights provided by your software, you can identify your ideal customer’s needs and how to create something of value that addresses those needs.
As you create more quality content that fulfills the needs of searchers, the search engines used by people to find information will also credit the authority of your work through higher rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). This is part of the evolving relationship between content and SEO and this line of thinking adds even greater authority to you and your brand. You can also use your software to measure what types of content instigate responses from your audience to further optimize the quality of your work.
Want to learn more about content marketing software? Download a quick guide that identifies how using software can improve the value of your content marketing plans.