How to Build a Successful Content Marketing Campaign

Creating great content starts with interesting your audience. Building great content marketing campaigns takes it a step further. Not only are you getting folks interested in your product/service offerings, but you’re also building relationships. Let’s examine how to build a successful content marketing campaign from the ground up! 

Strategy

The first part of developing a successful content marketing campaign is figuring out who the content is for. Define your audience and their needs. What are they looking for? Once you know who you’re trying to reach, it’s time to figure out how to reach them. That means selecting a format or medium for your main lead magnet. What’s going to attract people and make them want to be a part of your brand?

Another way of looking at your content marketing strategy is through three rings inside one another. The outside ring refers to what your brand does. Inside that ring is a smaller ring; that refers to how your brand does what it does differently than everyone else. At the center is the most important ring–the ring that defines why you do what you do differently than everyone else. That’s where the heart of your content marketing campaign strategy comes from. 

With your lead magnet and audience needs in mind, come up with a strategic and useful content plan to get people interested. Once you’ve got your content marketing campaign all planned out, it’s time to execute. 

Execution

Planning and mapping out content is one thing–executing it is another. The best way to execute a successful content marketing campaign is through devoted landing pages. Think of your content as a magnet that attracts people to that landing page. If additional content can inspire them to want/need your product or service, that’s as good as a cross-sell/upsell! 

Great execution starts with great research, organization, and copywriting. You have to really know what your audience is looking for. If you want to move folks through the funnel, your content has to be organized properly. In other words, each piece of content should have a specific function, whether it’s to raise awareness, drive interest, convert, solicit feedback, or something else. Finally, your copywriting needs to be on-point. Keep things direct, personal, and interesting!

Each piece of your digital presence plays an important function in any successful content marketing campaign. For instance, your social media–a preferred channel for content–complements your website, which is subsequently complemented by email marketing, and so on and so forth. The more you take advantage of each channel, the more likely you’ll be to inspire customers to jump on the funnel! 

Follow Up

Content marketing is essentially a way to put your content to work as a salesperson. Since the customer isn’t being overtly sold to, he or she is more likely to pay attention to the content, and in turn, go through the sales funnel. Like a sales pitch, content marketing needs to follow up with the prospect. 

However, unlike a sales pitch, your content marketing followup doesn’t involve knocking on the prospect’s door, calling them, or asking for the sale. Instead, the content itself moves them through the funnel. In other words, your follow up typically consists of more content–albeit with a sense of urgency. Let your content tell customers they need to act now. Keep the salespeople at home!

Content Marketing is an Ongoing Process

Though a content marketing campaign might be finite, content marketing is an ongoing process. That means one campaign should follow another. To that end, part of what makes content marketing successful is data and analytics. At the conclusion of a campaign, review all available data. What worked? Were you able to get enough leads? How many of those leads were you able to convert?

As with any successful part of marketing, the more honest feedback you get from your audience, the better. While you can’t directly ask a customer what pieces of content were the most useful in helping them make a purchase, you can review engagement and interaction metrics. Which pieces of content drove the most traffic to your website? Was there a particular medium (text/audio/video/infographic, etc) that got more engagement?

The most successful content marketing campaigns are data-driven. They take the data from past campaigns and then leverage it to create more effective content in subsequent campaigns. Whether you’re promoting a new product or building brand awareness, the principle is the same: content marketing works!