The Complete Guide to Content Marketing in 2024

Looking to grow your business? Then you should invest in content marketing—like, right now.

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what you sell, or who your customers are. Content can be used to increase brand awareness, secure more leads, and drive more revenue.

Of course, to achieve these things you need to develop a successful content marketing strategy. Don’t worry, I wrote this guide to help you do exactly that! Keep reading to learn:

What content marketing is and why it’s important
How to develop a content marketing strategy for your business
How to create content effectively and promote it to the right people
How to analyze key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess your content

Whether you’re just starting your content marketing journey, or you’re an industry veteran leading a content marketing team, this guide will give you the information you need to rank in search engines, connect with potential customers, and grow your business. Let’s get started!

Content Marketing: The Basics

You can’t build an effective content marketing strategy until you understand what content marketing is and why it’s important. So, bear with me as we cover a few basics…

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant content to a specific target audience. The goal? To build relationships, earn trust, and eventually, make sales.

Now, “relevant content” can vary. Blog posts, email sequences, case studies, social media posts, and video content all fit the bill. The key is to create the right content for your audience.

One more thing: content marketing is an inbound marketing technique. In other words, you create content that attracts potential customers to your business. While this approach may take longer to achieve results, it’s often more cost effective and leads to greater ROI.

Why is Content Marketing Important?

The right content marketing strategy will help you grow your company’s online visibility, increase brand awareness, and drive more organic traffic via search engines and social media. When these things happen, more leads and higher revenue numbers are almost inevitable.

Here are a few statistics to prove my point:

Companies that publish blog posts get 67% more leads than those that don’t
An overwhelming 82% of marketers are already engaged in content marketing
50% of marketers plan to invest more into content marketing in 2024 and beyond

As you can see, content marketing is essential. The question is, how do you create content effectively? Oh, and what do you do with that content once it’s been created?

Let’s talk about that…

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

Before you write a blog post or shoot a video, I want you to take a moment to strategize.

What goals do you want to achieve with content marketing? Who do you want to reach with your content? And what pieces do you need to create to make these things happen?

These are important questions. Fortunately, a strong content marketing strategy will help you answer them and ensure your content creation process is up to snuff. Here’s how to make one:

Set Clear Goals and Objectives

First, decide what you want to accomplish with content marketing.

You might want to build greater brand awareness. Or generate new leads. Or engage your current customers so that you retain a higher percentage of them. Or all three of these things.

High quality content can help you achieve all this and more. But you have to have an objective in mind. That way you know what to aim for and can ensure your efforts align with your goals.

Define Your Target Audience

Second, determine who you want to reach with your marketing content.

This group of people is known as your target audience and represent the potential customers you want to build relationships with. They are essential to success in content marketing.

Why? Without a clearly defined audience, you won’t know what kind of content to make, what topics to cover, or where to promote your content once it’s made.

Should you write blog posts or shoot videos? Talk about marketing or sales? Promote your finished pieces on Facebook or LinkedIn? A deep knowledge of your target audience will inform every facet of your content creation process.

So ask yourself questions like, “Who are my ideal customers?” and “What pain points do these people have?” and “What social media platforms are they most active on?”

Then assemble this information into a buyer persona, i.e., a fictional character that represents the future customers you want to reach with your content.

The best buyer personas include demographic information, like gender, age, income level, and physical location; as well as psychographic details like hopes, fears, and general interests.

Conduct a Content Audit

Have you started your content marketing journey? Then take a moment to conduct a content audit. In other words, evaluate the content you already have to assess its quality.

Bad content won’t help you attract leads or retain customers. In fact, it might have the opposite effect. You’ll want to improve these pieces so they work for your business, not against it.

Next, look for gaps in your content library. What topics have you not covered? High quality pieces that tackle these subjects will help your company reach more people.

What if you’re brand new to content marketing? You can conduct a content audit, too. Just study your competitors to see what they’ve already created; then aim to make something similar. This is a proven way to build a content marketing strategy at the very beginning.

Develop a Content Calendar

Lastly, flesh out your content marketing strategy into a comprehensive content calendar.

Be sure to include the types of content you’ll create, such as blog posts, how-to guides, podcasts, videos, infographics, and other forms of visual content. It should also answer the question, “How often will I create content?” and assign specific dates for pieces to be published.

Remember to craft valuable content for the each stage in the buyer’s journey:

The Awareness Stage

In the awareness stage, the buyer realizes they have a problem and seeks to learn more about it. Popular content at this point in the buyer’s journey includes blog posts, social media content, podcasts, ebooks, and video content published to sites like YouTube.

The Consideration Stage

In the consideration stage, the buyer fully understands their problem and looks for solutions to solve it. Popular content at this point in the buyer’s journey includes email sequences, case studies, white papers, and free samples and/or free trials.

The Decision Stage

In the decision stage, the buyer has determined how to solve their problem—they just need to purchase a solution to help them achieve their specific goals. Popular content at this point in the buyer’s journey includes landing pages, free offers, and discounts.

How to Create Content and Promote it Effectively

Now that you’ve developed an effective content marketing strategy, you can focus on creating content and promoting it to your target audience. Here are four tips for content marketers:

Craft High Quality Content

First things first, create content tailored to the potential customers you want to reach.

Ask yourself, “What kind of marketing materials do these people want?” and “What pain points do they need to address?” Then create compelling content that meets these parameters.

Here are a few more tips to help you create grade-A content in any format:

Write Interesting Headlines

It doesn’t matter what you’re making—an in-depth article, a YouTube video, a white paper, etc.—you need to grab your audience’s attention with an interesting headline or title. This will help your content stand out from the avalanche of information on the internet.

Structure Your Content the Right Way

Your podcasts, ebooks, and infographics should be structured in a way that compels your audience to keep listening, reading, or viewing. Make your content easy to consume and understand. And always look for ways to increase audience engagement.

Use Exciting Visuals When Possible

People respond to visual content. So make sure your blog posts include images, and your videos are visually pleasing. This is one of the easiest ways to increase audience engagement.

Maintain Your Brand Personality at all Times

What comes to mind when potential customers think about your company? Are you straightforward and professional? Fun and irreverent? Something else? Your content marketing strategies should play into these preconceptions. (Unless you’re looking to change them.)

Optimize Content for Search Engines

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of crafting and/or improving content so that it ranks higher in search engines. That way your target audience can find it.

SEO is a big topic. But I want to give you a few quick tips to help with this marketing strategy:

Keyword Research

Keywords are the words and phrases that users type into Google. You want to find the specific words and phrases your target audience cares about; then add them to your content. This will help Google understand what your content is about and rank it appropriately.

On-Page Optimization

If you want your content to rank in search engines (and you definitely want this, trust me) then you need to consider your titles, meta descriptions, headings, etc. for each of your webpages. Once again, this will help Google understand what your content is about.

Link Building Strategies

A backlink is a link that connects one website to another. They’re extremely important in terms of SEO. Why? Google views backlinks as a vote of confidence. The more your website has, the more likely Google will rank it in its search results pages. Of course, backlinks don’t just appear.

Read this article to learn how to build backlinks for your brand.

Your content marketing strategy will work better if you optimize your content for SEO. Skip this step and your ideal customers will have a hard time finding your blogs, videos, ebooks, etc.

Distribute and Promote Your Content

You’ve created a killer piece of content. Now what? You need to promote that bad boy!

That’s right, the creation process is only half the battle. You need to find ways to get eyeballs on the things you make. Fortunately, there are a few tried and true ways to make this happen:

Email Marketing

It’s been around for decades, but email marketing is still one of the best content marketing channels around. It’s not surprising. Email gives you direct access to your customers. Want to promote an ebook or podcast? Shoot an email to your subscribers. I bet a bunch of them will check it out. After all, they signed up for your list, so they obviously care about what you say.

When it comes to distributing content, few channels are more effective than social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I’d bet good money that you already have a few social media accounts set up—if not for your business, then definitely for yourself. Use them! Tell the world about your latest marketing piece and link to it.

Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Influencer marketing has blown up in recent years. By connecting with these folks on social media platforms, you can promote your content to a much wider audience. Find influencers in your niche, settle on compensation, and work with them to craft compelling social media posts.

A Paid Advertising Strategy

Paid ads will help your content reach a larger audience. It’s not the best solution for every piece of content because it costs money to implement—sometimes a lot of money. But if you’ve created something special and want a ton of people to see it, paid ads will get the job done. Just remember to set a budget, target the right people, and monitor your results.

Creating content is obviously important. But promoting said content is just as vital. Build an email, influencer marketing, paid ads, or social media strategy to get your content out there.

Repurpose and Recycle Old Content

Before we move on, we need to talk about content repurposing. You don’t have to create a dozen pieces of content per week. You can create one piece of content and repurpose it.

For example, you could record a podcast; then summarize the recording in a blog post, publish top insights to your social media channels, and assemble key stat into an infographic. Doing so will allow you to supercharge your content marketing efforts without forcing you to work 24/7.

Oh, I should mention this: you can repurpose other people’s content, too. For example, you can take user-generated content, like reviews and customer testimonials, and publish them to your own social media channels. This is another great way to produce extra marketing materials.

Content Marketing: Performance and Analytics

Okay, you’ve implemented your content marketing strategy…

You’re publishing articles on your website, shooting videos for YouTube—you even have a podcast that drops every Thursday. You’re totally crushing your content marketing efforts.

I just have one question for you: Is all of that content working for your business? Is it helping you build authority, generate more leads, and produce more revenue?

The only way to really know is to track and analyze your content marketing results. Here’s how:

Measure and Track Your Content Performance

First, choose metrics and KPIs that align with your content marketing goals. (Remember when we talked about goals above? This is one reason why they’re so important.)

For example, if you’re trying to boost brand awareness, you’ll want to track website visitors and similar metrics. If you’re trying to boost sales and revenue, you’ll want to track conversions.

Next, choose tools to track the metrics you care about. Google Analytics will help you monitor your website. Litmus will help you analyze your email marketing campaigns. And Hootsuite will help you schedule social media posts and track how they perform in real time. (There are many other tools out there. If you don’t like these options, find different ones that fit your needs.)

Analyze and Interpret Data Correctly

Don’t just track metrics; analyze the data and draw conclusions.

Which blog posts get the most views? Do people watch all of your YouTube videos, or cut out part way through? How many people downloaded your infographic? Does your social media strategy drive traffic to your website? Are you satisfied with your paid advertising campaigns?

All the marketing content in the world won’t benefit you if people don’t see and/or engage with it. By analyzing content performance, you can learn what actually works—then do more of it.

Optimize and Iterate Based on Insights

Speaking of “doing more of it,” you need to take the insights you’ve gleaned and update your content strategy. This will help you connect with your target audience and achieve more success. Why? Because you’ll make more things they want, in the way they want them made.

Always ask yourself, “Can I improve my content marketing efforts?” Then track metrics, analyze the data, and iterate your approach based on the results. This is how to win with content.

Elevate Your Content Marketing Efforts

As we’ve seen, content marketing is essential.

But you can’t just create content at random. You need to develop a strategy, monitor the results you achieve, and iterate your approach. This is the only way to achieve success in this area.

Here’s the good news: I just gave you all the information you need to build (and implement!) a successful content marketing strategy—even if you’re brand new to this stuff.

Start by setting goals and defining your target audience. Then create high quality content and promote it via email, social media, or whatever channels you prefer. Finally, track your results so you know what works and what doesn’t in your particular niche.

Having trouble building a content marketing strategy? Maybe you’re set on strategy, but struggle to create valuable content for your customers. Whatever the case may be, I can help. Get in touch and together we’ll increase your brand’s online visibility, reputation, and revenue. Let’s go!