Content Writing Basic Steps

• Content marketing fits into the customer journey

• Mapping your content

• Creating effective content consistently

• How to monetize and distribute content

• Content marketing tools to try out

1. How content marketing fits into the customer journey

Marketing professionals are familiar with the customer journey, which outlines the steps a person goes through from first contact with your content to become a prospect and finally buying from you. An effective content marketing strategy consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

The Awareness stage's top-of-the-funnel content

Once someone becomes aware of your company, the top of the funnel appears. It is possible to educate, define, contextualize, clarify, and inform your audience. The awareness stage is not the time to sell, but naming and framing their problems will increase their responsiveness to anything presented to them. Creating blog posts requires articulating a problem, contextualizing it, and offering solutions that resonate with people in the awareness stage. A few examples of blog post titles for visitors who haven't figured out their problem:

• Make sure your marketing collateral doesn't make these 4 responsive design mistakes.
• Instead of focusing on conversion rates, optimize engagement instead.

Middle-of-the-funnel content for the Consideration stage

People are still exploring your product as prospects. It's common for people to try new things but not get them. During the pandemic, Drift is presenting monthly webinars to remove sales roadblocks. A different host hosts each session. Keeping your sales team close will be your top priority. As a marketing and sales company, Drift works well in the middle. 

Bottom-of-the-funnel content at the Decision stage

The bottom-of-funnel content targets the target audience at the point when they are about to make a purchase decision. The stakes are high here since you're essentially persuading prospects to buy your product over a competitor's. 

Content targeting the decision stage should provide evidence of expected results to persuade prospects that your solution is the best choice among many options.

To showcase the stories and examples of our customers, we have created web pages. This is an excellent approach as it allows customers to see our extensive list of customers and find templates they might find helpful. 

It is essential to understand the customer journey to present the correct type of content at the right time to reach potential buyers.

2. Mapping your content

Having trouble deciding what direction to take? Analyzing all your content assets and applying them to the customer journey is the best way to get strategic with your content.

You should determine where each content asset fits into the customer journey and how effectively they move prospects forward. 

You can use this to:

• Make sure your funnel contains all the content you need
• You should optimize content by its purpose

Content audits are intended to give you a clear understanding of your published content, how it is performing, and how you should plan for the future.

Identifying gaps with a content audit

Start by creating a spreadsheet that includes a list of every article your company has written and intends to write in the future. This will help you identify gaps in your content strategy. Among the columns in the spreadsheet should be status (published or planned), type, title, stage of the customer journey targets, persona targets, and URL. By filling out this sheet, you will be able to identify areas of your content that may need improvement. Most of your content, for example, focuses on the decision stage and has little to do with awareness. 

Ensure that every customer stage and persona combination is covered with quality content by focusing your content creation efforts on filling these gaps.

Establishing goals for your content

Once you have determined the place of each piece of content within the customer journey, you can check whether or not it is functioning correctly.

• Helping people define their problems is one of your awareness stage goals.
• Can you demonstrate the merits of your solution through the assets you are considering?

Decide on measurable goals before you answer these questions. To optimize each piece of content, you need to determine what goals you should set for it.

Use the following six content goals (yours may differ):

1. Acquisition: The process of attracting new visitors
2. Activation: The process of converting visitors into subscribers 
3. Education: Maintain subscriber engagement and loyalty
4. Revenue: Converting visitors into buyers 
5. Expansion: Incentives to upgrade customers
6. Referral: Creating evangelists from customers

Activation falls neatly into the consideration stage, depending on the context, even though acquisition and activation are primarily associated with the awareness stage. A content's effectiveness and optimization can be measured by assigning goals. Once a plan has been identified, the point of an asset can be evaluated and optimized. 

4. Create effective content consistently

As we've described previously, content marketing is about sharing valuable content with customers, tracking and measuring its effectiveness, and coming up with fantastic ideas for content marketing. 

Creating consistently compelling content is now the next step. 

The following two methods can be used:  

Create a style guide 

A style guide ensures that all your content is written in the same voice, tone, and style. You can build a style guide that helps multiple writers achieve a consistent brand voice by following a set of guidelines. 

The following areas should be covered in your style guide: 

• Using grammar
• Personality, voice, style, and tone
• Avoid cliches
• Designed by
• Industry-specific words
• Guidelines for blogs, videos, and podcasts

It is essential to create a style guide that makes your content cohesive, maintains your tone and style, and makes your business seem professional and trustworthy.

Repurpose content 

By repurposing content, you are extending the reach of existing content. Repurposing content is also called "content recycling." Simple, you do not have to begin from scratch every time you write a post, record a podcast, or shoot a video.

Rather than republishing old content, you can recycle it as follows: 

• A blog article is adapted to suit a new buyer persona
• Making social media posts with soundbites from older content 
• An infographic that incorporates facts and stats from a piece of content  

5. How to monetize and distribute content

It's time to publish your written, researched, and researched content. It is still necessary to work on a lot of things. To create traffic and raise brand awareness, you must promote what you have and develop a marketing strategy.

Content promotion can be done in a variety of ways. 

Social Media

Your company and niche can be discussed on social media, allowing you to reach a large audience. You can share your content, whether it's your own or another person's page. Groups that you are a member of can also be communicated with. Consequently, you can share on social media in endless ways. The majority of viral content is also shared on social media. Take a look at memes, videos, hashtags, etc.

Listed below are some tips for promoting yourself on social media: 

• Messages should be different for each platform but cross-posted
• If possible, tag businesses or people that are relevant

On Your Blog

Your blog is the perfect place for your content to live. Blogs serve as content hubs. Here you can publish articles, brochures, reports, etc. Sharing updates about new products or services is another excellent way to use your blog. Regular content audits are essential for keeping your blog relevant. An article published years ago is not what anyone wants to see. It can be enough to keep your content current to get people to share it.

Blog promotion tips:

• Information that is outdated or irrelevant should be updated
• Guest posting should be promoted
• Round up your findings

Email Broadcast

Newsletters and drip campaigns are effective places to share your content. Articles related to the main message are generally interspersed throughout the newsletter. There's a chance that readers will be intrigued by something that catches their eye, even if they don't click on all the links. Some people's email signatures may also include a recent guide or webinar. At the very least, they know that it exists and may be intrigued enough to click on it.

Email sharing ideas:

• Featured in newsletters
• Campaigns using drips
• Sending an email 

Guest Posts

Guest posts and roundups can help you earn backlinks. You can write content beneficial to your non-competing company's customers and generate traffic back to your content if you find one.The benefits of guest posting include discussing relevant content and building a new audience. This is done while at the same time promoting your content and gaining exposure.  

Guest posting tips:

• Keep an eye out for blogs where guest writers are featured
• When you can, participate in roundups
• You may be able to swap guests with your partners

Paid Ads

Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn may charge for promoting specific content. You can use display ads if you want more people to see your content. A landing page can help you engage your audience with your content if you drive paid traffic to it. 

The following tips will help you create paid ads to promote your content:

• Make sure your keywords are high-ranking
• Choose a target audience, and set yourself a budget
• Compelling copy should be used in your ads
• Start with a landing page

6. Content marketing tools to try out

You are likely wondering how to do all this stuff. I think you're right! As a content creator, you can benefit from some helpful tools that can save you time and help you do the most time-consuming tasks more efficiently.

We recommend the following tools:

Blogging tools

• SEMrush. Keyword ideas can be brainstormed using this tool. SEMrush allows you to search for keywords such as "content marketing ."Then, more relevant keywords will appear, such as "content marketing case studies," "content marketing success," etc. 

• Keywords Everywhere. If you go to Google and type in any keyword, including relevant ones, you can quickly get the search volume. The tool helps you find keywords on a variety of platforms at the same time, saving you time. 

• Ahrefs. Analyzing a site's link profile, keyword rankings, and SEO health is a primary function of this tool. In addition to Google, YouTube, and Amazon keyword research, Ahrefs can help you find relevant terms for your website. 
• Google Analytics. You can use this to track things like bounce rates, time on site, average pages visited, and more on your blogs.

• Answer the Public. This free service lets you see which questions people have asked about specific topics. In addition to generating more varied, clear, and useful content ideas, it is also a great way to develop your own.
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Writing tools

• The Google Docs application. This is such a great idea. What's not to love? It's great for collaborating with colleagues, even if they're halfway across the world since all your files are saved online and accessible from anywhere!

A grammar checker. Grammar and spelling mistakes are highlighted by this tool. Content littered with grammatical errors is the last thing you want 

• errors.
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Video tools

• Stock video websites. Adding royalty-free footage to your videos is easy with this tool. 

• I Movie and Windows Movie Maker. You can use both of these (and they're both free!) programs to edit videos on your Mac and PC.

Podcast tools

• Buzzsprout. It is easy for beginners to get started with this podcast platform and it has many advanced features for experienced users. Additionally, you can monetize your show on the forum.

Content creation tools

• Follow. Creating branded content is easy with Foleon Doc and Drag & Drop Editor.

Successful Content Marketing?

It is generally understood that content marketers use content marketing to accomplish three purposes. In contrast, content entrepreneurs focus on creating an audience, then monetizing it in both direct and indirect ways.

1. Product or service sales: Content marketing aims to generate sales of the products and services it promotes.
2. 2. Savings: This initiative would allow the company to save on a marketing cost otherwise incurred by another marketing activity.
3. Sunshine: Fostering long-term relationships with customers leads to happier customers. A loyal or frequent customer generally buys more and stays longer.