Content marketing should not be thought of as merely advertising but a long-term commitment to solving the problems and pain points of your audience. Through continuous engagement and relevant content you have the opportunity to trigger a response, further creating credibility and trust for your brand. CM is here to stay and only keeps getting deeper entrenched within your digital community. It is important to gain a clear head and focus in order to produce desired outcomes. The B2B Content Marketing Statistics for 2014 clearly demonstrates not only the importance but some of the issues involved around content strategy, tactics, budgets, metrics, platforms, and time requirements.

“Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”  Content Marketing Institute

Cultivating and nurturing these relationships is part of the lead conversion in your marketing funnel. Consider where your audience lives and what they want and need. How can you make their lives easier, more simplified or answer their most pressing questions?

Think more in terms of solutions, benefits and features. Remember, it’s a two-way conversation, not a soapbox.

Content can be in a variety of forms: website, blog post, video, image, podcast, e-book, white paper, newsletter, social media post or an email. Whatever platform or venue you choose, direct it toward your readers and what they crave.

It isn’t a mass blast.

Quality over quantity because if you are simply pushing words to fill spaces, you probably aren’t being all that remarkable. You don’t want to be scratchy noise, but someone who is “follow-worthy,” shareable, intelligent, educational and helpful.

Brands and their agencies believe deeply that content is the future, and anyone who doesn’t get onboard will be left behind. Shane Snow

Creating a strategy AND tactics needs to be a part of your plan. What do you want to achieve with your content marketing? Who do you want to reach? Just because you read about the value and importance of CM, doesn’t translate to crazed writing and pushing of paragraphs. You need a method to your madness.  Jason DeMers suggests 5 essential goals to consider as part of your content marketing plan:

1. Help & educate
2. Build a community
3. Demonstrate your expertise
4. Help the search engines help you
5. Keep in touch with your customers

When writing your content, these five components will help you to deliver rich and relevant content that interests your audience, creates deeper relationships, builds your online brand reputation and ensures greater results for your efforts and expertise.

Content Marketing Review

1. Goals
2. Strategy
3. Editorial calendar
4. Content
5. An understanding of your buyer personas
6. Where does your audience hang out
7. What are their greatest pain points?
8. What drives them to purchase?
9. What are they searching for?
10. Appeal to their logical mind as well as their emotions
11. Write for them. To them….. not the search engines.
12. Find the best distribution channels
13. Cross promote or vary content
14. Track and measure engagement, conversation and results

In your quest to write something fresh and exciting, you may hit a few stumbling blocks, like we all do. It can be so frustrating. You have a few ideas or no ideas and you need a little more inspiration. Check out some of the links below to tweak your brain power and start tapping those keys.

50+ Tools for Content Curation and Content Marketing

Content Curation & Content Marketing – Curata Blog

Use Visual Content to Engage Your Audience: 9 Tips and 25 Examples

How to Go “All-In” with Content Marketing: 8 Experts Weigh In

Competing With Content Marketing: 7 Steps to Success [Infographic]

50 Content Marketing Ideas For Your Website Or Blog

The Cheat Sheet on Content Marketing