Marketing's new powerful revenue generating tool

Everyone is talking content marketing and many CMOs have included it in their marketing strategies. When looking at developed markets such as the US and Europe, we can see it has proved to be successful, so implementing it within the South African environment is a logical step.

In the past, marketing teams created content for specific incidents. For example, if you were launching a new product, this would require a brochure, a press release and a 'how to' video. With the advent of content marketing, this has changed to marketers having to create high quality content continuously. There is no denying this is a difficult and costly task.

With this in mind, it is of utmost importance to develop a content strategy to ensure that you are not just entering the content marketing field because it is the hottest thing to do right now.

You may find you have the greatest revenue generating tool ever in your marketing artillery if you get your content strategy right.

Content strategy: Five key elements

1. Content marketing objective

Every marketing strategy begins with objectives, and this should be no different for your content strategy.

Define exactly what you want to achieve and make sure your objectives are smart.
An example of an objective for your content strategy could be "able to generate ten leads per day by the end of next quarter".

2. Target market

Once again, in marketing strategies you know who your target markets are, and you need to do the same for content strategies.

With content strategies, you should identify all the people that influence your buyers and ensure you are developing content that speaks directly to each personality.

A good way to think about this is to consider what they would search for if buying your product or service on a search engine. For example, if you are selling customer service training courses, an HR manager will search for something completely different to the call centre manager, even though they will both influence the purchase in the end.

3. Measuring return on investment

This is the most important thing to include in your content marketing strategy and will drive the structure of it. If you are spending time and money on developing great content, how will you recoup those costs with a margin on top of it?

Content marketing should be measured based on the amount of qualified leads it is generating, it should not be about how many people read your content or share it on their social networks.

The only way to generate leads from content is to make it part of an inbound marketing strategy whereby you strategically target specific topics that your target market would look at, and integrate these into premium content that captures readers' details and then nurture them until they purchase.

4. Sustainability

Content marketing is not campaign based, it is program based - this means you need to be constantly creating excellent content. Frequency and consistency is key, and as a result you need dedicated resources to manage and deliver on your content strategy.

You will run the risk of your content marketing be intermittent and as a result, less effective if content development is just another task that a marketing manager, PR agency or digital agency does. There are always important tasks and projects arising and writing a daily article can easily be put at the bottom of a list, and before you know it a week has gone by without any new content.

5. Making content go viral

Going viral means that people share your content with friends and colleagues and as a result it reaches masses of people. Although this should not be a content marketing objective as it is does not necessarily result in revenue generation, it should be something that you consider.

If by sharing a piece of content the one who shares it will look good, they will share it - keep this in mind when creating your content. Make it fresh, make it of high quality and make it beautiful - spend that little extra on design, it will pay off.

In summary, remember:

• to generate content for the right reasons - to generate leads and build loyalty.
  
• to create different content for different personalities.
  
• to build inbound marketing into your content strategy to generate revenue and measure return on investment.
  
• that you need dedicated internal resource, or outsource to a inbound marketing agency.
  
• to make your content amazing, and people will share it.