What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a complex process involving steps like strategizing, content production, content analysis, and result analysis. However simple these steps may sound, they are difficult to execute with the same efficiency even for professionals in a market that is brimming with information, combining content with various distribution options and dealing with a buyer who is risk aversive.

How Does Content Marketing Work?

There are 5 distinctive steps for content marketing:

Step 1: Plan

This step involves creating a plan that aims to guide your brand’s content marketing campaigns. This first step is the foundation of the upcoming 4 steps of creation, publication, distribution, and analysis. Planning includes understanding how a brand and its targeted audience will intersect with each other in the form of content. It also includes the process of development of specific themes and other procedures.

Polus Media Tip:

  1. While working on the planning phase, research as much as possible to understand your targeted audience.
  2. Keep in mind that good content has 3 qualities: it’s engaging to read, useful and easy to consume (make sense out of it)
  3. Start with more generalized topics and then move down the funnel to narrower ones.

Step 2: Create

This process involves gathering creative ideas, themes and topics and transforming all of them into useful content. This process involves the creation of raw material and not a final published product. It is critical to identify the topics in specific that the content would be based on. The use of technology during this process to allow efficient creation and collection of content is vital.

Polus Media Tip:

  1. Outsource your content creation. It can include third-party experts and freelancers as well.
  2. A simple workflow should be implemented in which subject matter experts’ source raw material, then it is routed to the editors and then to the designers.
  3. Focus on creating an asset that is substantial enough to facilitate your content marketing in all possible ways.


Step 3: Publish

Publishing content transforms all the raw material of assets into published form. The creation of a final list of content assets that will be compatible with your content marketing platform is vital. Common types of assets include blog posts, articles, online events, and videos. The workflow and main target of this process are to edit and approve content assets to be published finally. Marketers can also make use of one content asset and publish it into multiple published assets.

Polus Media Tip:

  1. Create once – use many times. Create a generalized core content and convert it into many other forms of assets like blog posts, presentations, and videos.
  2. Identify the best content types that you will support in your organization and standardize them.
  3. Development of a publishing cadence to publishing a steady stream of content regularly.

Step 4: Distribute

Once the content gets published successfully, it is now ready to be distributed. A general rule of thumb for marketers is to use published content and apply several distribution tactics to it. The most common types of content distribution tactics include Search Engine Optimization, social sharing, paid search, and email marketing. To get the most of this phase, marketers should come up with the development of different distribution packages that link with a specific asset. 

Polus Media Tip:

  1. Focus on creating a core set of tactics with less than 3 distribution tactics that allow you to hit the right numbers throughout your media campaign.
  2. Wrap those 3 distribution tactics with other distribution tactics that have the potential to deliver upside against the number.
  3. At times, consider setting your content free in the wild and see what happens.

Step 5: Analyze

The content analysis depends on the content marketing platform. There are tons of other parameters that tell you whether your content is doing well or not including engagement, traffic generation, and lead conversion. While these matrices play a huge role in content analytics, there are other factors as well that allow for more productive content analysis. Standardizing content analytics like this can free up a lot of time for team members to get engaged in more strategical activities.

Polus Media Tip:

  1. Identify the trends and keep a track of tactical factors and parameters that play a role in content analysis.
  2. Develop custom matrices that allow your business strategic objectives to be tied with content marketing. A few examples can be brand equity, customer engagement, and revenue achievement.
  3. Constantly optimizing the platform by focusing on topics, asset types and distribution channels that are trending in your target markets.


Tips For Choosing The Right Content Marketing Platform For Your Business

Here at Polus Media, we care about your intention and prioritize your business goals to be achieved. Here are our tips on how to choose the right content marketing platform for your business.

Tip 1: Understand What Is Content Management Platform

A content management platform is a technical solution dedicated for marketers to derive awareness, generate leads and revenue from the content. It enables a scalable and data-driven approach across the areas of planning, creation, publication, distribution, and analysis. It is not a Content Management System (CMS), Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) or Project Management Software and must not be confused with any of them.

Tip 2: Is Content Management Platform Really What You Need?

Determining how content is playing a part in all of the sales team is one of the top priorities of a marketing team. A content Management Platform keeps all the content in a single place and provides granular analysis for better content creation in the future.

Tip 3: Understand Your Requirements

When you realize you need a CMP for your organization, you start determining your needs and wants. The time is taken to implement the CMP in your organization and the cost greatly depends on your decision and a vendor’s reputation in the market also comes to play.

Tip 4: Research Vendors

Do thorough research of vendors from your domain. The better the vendor’s reputation, the better are your chances of making the most of your content management platform. Do look for their reviews, read customer testimonials and case-studies and even better, talk to an existing customer about their experience.

Tip 5: Ask For A Demo

Before finalizing anything with the specific vendor, you must ask for a demo to make sure if the vendor is capable enough to deliver you what you need. It is also beneficial for the vendor to cover any pitfalls during the session and get more synchronized with you.


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