The best way to begin content marketing is with a content strategy. Here are a few steps to help you get started:

1. Identify Your Audience: Every business and industry has a target audience, so it's important to identify yours. It’s easier to create content relevant to your audience and keep them interested in what you say about your products or services when you narrow down who the content is for by asking yourself questions such as: who is my target customer? How old are they? What is their income? What are their needs?
2. Set Goals and Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-sensitive (SMART) goals are a great way to identify goals and set KPIs for your content marketing strategy. They give you or a digital marketing team realistic and measurable goals.
3. Audit Your Current Content: If you already have a website, you have some content you can review. Determine whether your content is directed toward that audience and meets your business's needs and goals.
4. Research Successful Content For Your Industry or Niche: Understanding successful content in your niche is important and can help you create timely, relevant, and successful content for your business. Creating fresh and innovative content can help you stay ahead of the competition and lead the industry with new ideas and knowledge.
5. Create a Content Calendar: Creating a content calendar can keep your team organized and help you coordinate content and other marketing efforts. For example, a paint distributor can benefit from seasonal content, so it should create topics with each season in mind. In comparison, a business that creates custom machining parts doesn’t really need to worry about seasonality and should focus on evergreen content that’s always valuable.

Some types of metrics and KPIs that are important for a variety of content include:

• Organic search traffic volume and sources
• Views on videos and podcasts
• Click-through-rate (CTR) on web pages
• Engagement (social shares, comments, or email open rates)

Keywords are still important for content marketing. They help users find your website, and using them improves its SEO, allowing Google to potentially rank it higher on the search engine results page (SERP).

There are many ways to help people read your content. Most importantly, creating content that is relevant to your audience and easy to read helps more people want to interact with it. You can create easy-to-read content by:

• Including descriptive headers with keywords
• Using charts and lists to break content into manageable sections
• Including valuable and relevant images
• Adding links to additional information and reliable sources
• Improving your methods of distribution

If you’re looking for experts who can create and implement a content strategy, you can rely on Creekmore Marketing. We’re very familiar with digital marketing methods and want to help you grow your business with our services, including:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Website Design
• Branding
• Social Media Solutions

Get a free consultation today to unlock tangible ways to grow your business.