If you are interested in online advertising and various ways of website promotion on the Internet, then you have probably heard something about content marketing. It is often cited as one of the most promising channels for attracting new customers, increasing brand awareness and developing the business in general. One of the successful companies working in this direction is Smooth Business Growth

As often happens, the information on each of the sites is incomplete,and the articles only consider  one of the aspects of this rather extensive topic. Therefore, I decided to write this article, in which I will answer your main potential questions about content marketing, and I will try to explain all the main points briefly and so that everyone understands.

What is content marketing and what are its benefits?

There are many definitions for this term, but if you try to explain everything briefly and clearly, we get something like the following:

"Content marketing is a set of marketing techniques, the essence of which is the creation and distribution of valuable content for the target audience, in order to increase conversions, sales, brand awareness or other business objectives."

Content marketing can be divided into two areas - internal and external. In the first case, work is carried out exclusively on a blog on the site; in the second, articles with a link to the company's website are published on other sites.

This is not direct advertising, and content marketing should not be viewed as a direct sales generation tool. For such purposes, there are special types of online advertising.

Nevertheless, content marketing still partially has a positive effect on sales, due to a number of advantages that its application in practice provides a business:

• Increased traffic.
• Brand recognition. 
• Leads, conversions and sales. 
• The emergence of natural links.
• Brand positioning. 

How to Build an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

The first and most important prerequisite for implementing a successful content marketing strategy is understanding your target audience. You need to know who your potential customers are, their interests, pain, criteria for making decisions and the problems they solve with your products / services.

Then, you need to decide on the goals that you are going to achieve with the help of content marketing. Depending on the specifics of the business, it could be:

• increasing brand awareness;
• increase in traffic from search engines;
• building a loyal audience around the site;
• attracting new leads, increasing sales;
• building a brand from scratch, improving the company's image, etc.

Creating a content plan and finding authors

 The hardest part of content marketing is finding good writers. You don’t just need people who are well-versed in a certain niche (which is already a rarity in itself), but those who are also able to express their thoughts well in writing.

But difficult does not mean impossible. Depending on the required profile and level of knowledge, you can find authors for creating content:

• on freelance exchanges;
• thematic forums;
• groups on social networks;
• through advertisements on job sites;
• by recommendation

Another viable option that is often overlooked is to involve the company's employees in writing articles (and even shooting videos). Among them, there may well be someone who is good at this task.

And the issue of grammar and other similar things can be solved if you involve a freelance editor.

The second important point - be sure to make a content plan before starting work. You don't want to get bogged down in chaos, missed deadlines, and, as a result, spend money without getting the desired effect.

It's very simple to do: make a preliminary list of topics on which you plan to publish, and then distribute it on the calendar. It is enough to do a month or two in advance, and this will significantly simplify the work.

Seeding or distributing content

You can write a great, interesting and useful article, but it won't do much good if no one reads it. There are a huge number of sites on the Internet, so how do people know that something interesting has appeared on yours?

It is this task that content distribution solves, which is, one of the most important stages in the implementation of the content marketing strategy. The bottom line is to convey the information about the existence of your article to the largest possible audience.

Different tools can be used for this purpose, which differ in terms of efficiency, time and cost. But as the most effective, I recommend using two main ones: email newsletters and social networks.

In the case of email newsletters, the algorithm is as simple as possible: they publish an article on a blog on the site, add a mention with a link to it in the newsletter template, and send it to their subscribers (once a week, for example).

Regarding social networks, there are two options for distributing content: reposts on its own official page, as well as the regular launch of promotional posts. That is, the promotion of each individual publication on the social network (targeted advertising). Twitter is great for promoting small businesses. Read more about this here https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/business/smallbusiness/23twitter.html?searchResultPosition=2

Post-analytics as an important element of success

Which articles bring the most traffic? What topics are the most popular on social media? Which blog pages generate leads and conversions? Do users who go to the site from publications on other people's sites make orders with you?

You will need to answer these and many other questions to make your content marketing work successful in the long run. It is impossible to make the perfect strategy the first time, you will need to make adjustments anyway, and tanalyzing  materials after publication will help to do this.