Content Strategy & Marketing

Welcome to the content strategy course. I'm Alicia and I will be your instructor. In this course will cover how to plan content, create content,distribute and promote content,design websites for marketing of effectiveness.Measure the impact of content marketing.And finally we'll learn about jobs and content marketing.Throughout this course we will refer back to our company examples.It's important to remember their marketing objectives and key performance indicators, KPIs.For our e-commerce example Betabrand that's increasing women's apparel sales. For our informational website is Ezequiel Farca the architect,It's improving brand awareness which can be measured by the number of website visitors and our business to business example Bamboo HR is focused on increasing sales leads.A large part of the marketing map is how,as in how will you reach customers? What content will inspire engage and retain them?How do you get your message across matters? That's where content strategy and content marketing comes in. In this lesson, you'll learn that the role of content strategy and content marketing,be introduced to marketing platform HubSpot and learn how to organize your content.

Plan Your Content Strategy
Create Content
Distirbute & Promote Content
Optmize/Analyze Website UX & landing Pages
Mesure/Analyze Impact
Jobs In Content marketing

Content strategy is the unified approach you will take to generate and distribute content in a number of different channels to accomplish a marketing objective. Strategy is the why of content. Before you set out to do anything related to content you want to understand why you are doing it. And if you're not doing it to meet a marketing objective you'll want to think twice.Content marketing focuses on the tactics and execution; the actual creation,editing, and maintaining of content that's specifically created for the purposes of marketing. Content marketing is about creating content that people not only want to consume, but also helps customers along in their journey. Content is your message which often includes or is a variation of your value proposition in a variety of formats. Content can be anything from blog post, to a thank you page, to an ad and is aimed at building a trusted connection between you and your audience.Content can have many purposes, be on many topics, and take many formats. For example, content can be the video on your web site that describes your product. Content can be an article you write on a subject related to your product or service that you publish in a social media channel like, 10 questions to ask when interviewing candidates. Content can be an ad that describes your offer that you pay to show up in search engine results. Your Content has multiple jobs. It needs to attract visitors. Persuade them, nurture them and get people to promote your company service are offering. It's truly the fuel that powers a successful marketing campaign. Let's turn to our partner HubSpot a leading marketing platform for their take. In a nutshell, content marketing is really just the art of communicating with your prospects and customers without having to sell them. As opposed to marketing or advertising your products and services, you're creating helpful entertaining content that your prospects and customers can enjoy and learn from.
 Learn The Role Of Content Strategy & Content Marketing
Be Introduced To Marketing Platform Hubspot

Learn How To Organise Your Content

Generate And Distribute Content To Different Channels For Acomplishing a marketing Objective
Strategy Is The Why Of Content. Like Why Are You Doing It If You Are Not Doing It To Meet Any Marketing Objective Then ReThink Of The Content Type.

Content? : Your Message Could Be Anything To Marketing
Format? : The Manner The Content Is Presented.

It Focuses On Tactics And Excution
Create + Editing + Maintaining 

There's a process to content marketing. Let's hear more from Hubspot. Typically, a content process has four steps. Those steps are Plan, Create, Distribute and Analyze. Then take what you learn through your analysis and repeat it all over again. Let's go through what each of those steps actually entails, starting with the planning portion. So you have your definition of content. Simply put content is information. The content is best defined by three things: Its Purpose, Its format and it's topic. First, what is the purpose of this content? Is the purpose to essentially get people to your site? Or to get them to convert to leads.That is the big difference between these two. Content offers are a form of content that are typically gated by a landing page or behind a form. The purpose of a content offer is to convert visits to leads whereas your blog posts, videos and web site pages are open access to anyone on the internet. The purpose of these pieces of content is to attract strangers to your web site. Once you have an idea about the purpose, think about the format of that piece of content. Content itself comes in many different flavors. A piece of content could be a case study, a video, infographic, a white paper, a calculator or a worksheet, an e-book, a template, research report, checklist, webinar, slideshare deck or whatever else you can come up with. But what's the difference between all these formats? Well, not much. You can tell the same story with almost each and every one. Which format you choose to use depends on who you're creating content for, how much time you have to create it and how much information you have to present.

Content Is Defined By

Purpose - The Why Type Like Offers To Convert Visits To Leads And Blogpost Which Is Oppen To Everyone
Format - Any Type Like Case Study, Videos, Infographics, WhitePaper, WorkSheet, E-book, Templet, Research Report, CheckList, Webniar, Slideshare Deck Etc
Topic - Related To Your Marketing Objective.

What content format is right for your audience? That's all about your target audience, or target persona. HubSpot calls this your buyer persona. Let's hear more. Picking the best format for your content is all about your buyer personas. The information contained in the content is what helps people achieve their own goals, and the design is what makes it easily digestible,or accessible, by your buyer personas. Think for a moment. Is your buyer persona a visual learner? Then maybe consider using an infographic. If you know they read blog posts on a regular basis, maybe make a blog post work. If you have a particularly valuable piece of content,maybe it belongs behind a form. Test out different content formats and see what works best.If you're having a hard time determining your content's format, then check with your sales team. Your sales team is a great resource to understanding what types of content you need to effectively communicate with your buyer personas.

Content Needs To Align With The CDJ
Awareness & Interest
Educational Blogs,Videos,Infographics,Analyses,Ebook Etc
Desire
product Comparasion,Webinars,Video,Podcast,WhitePapers Etc
Action
product Literature,Testimonials,Checklist,Images Etc
Post Action
How To Email,Follow Up Email,Community Fourms Etc

Buyer Persona : Whom You Want To Reach
The Buyer's Journey : What Content Would Be Helpful To Them

The topic of your content depends on your customer and where they are in the customer journey. HubSpot refers to customer journey as buyers' journey. Let's learn more. The final element of a piece of content is the content topic. What are you writing about? Figuring out a topic for your content is one of the most important parts of content creation. And sometimes it can be the hardest part. But it doesn't have to be. To easily come up with the best content topic for every piece of content you create, there are just two things you need to know. These two things are the keys to creating remarkable content. They are your buyer personas who you are trying to reach and the buyer's journey, what content will be most interesting or helpful to them.In order to create remarkable content.You have to tailor it to both your buyer personas and where they are on the buyer's journey. If you use these two things youll be perfectly poised to create remarkable content that will transform your inbound efforts from passable to outstanding. If you're creating content without these two things in mind, then you're not going to be as efficient or effective as you could be. Buyer personas are who you're trying to attract, convert, close and delight. This is your ideal customer, your buyer persona is who you're creating content for. The best content is the kind of content that your buyer personas want to read, share, and come back for. So you need to create content with them in mind always. Great content is educational. Your ultimate content goal is to solve your buyer personas' problems and you can do this through education.You can identify topics that matter to your buyer personas through keyword research. What you want to rank for? Internet forums, popular industry news, sales and support frequently ask question, your buyer personas' goals and your buyer personas' challenges. The first step to creating content that resonates with your readers is gaining a better understanding of who your readers are; especially the ones you want to convert into leads and customers. When you know who they are you can create the right content that perfectly suits their needs. And what about the buyer's journey? How does that play in a remarkable content?Well, how you should define remarkable content is that its solution based; not product based. Remember, remarkable content isn't about your business or your product; it's about your potential customers. The problems they're having and the answers they're searching for. In order to provide a solution, you have to understand the problem. The buyer's journey helps you do this. We call it the customer journey is the steps people go through leading up to and after taking an action with you. The customer journey again is made up of five stages; aware, interests, desire, action and post action. You want to create content that matches where the customer is on their journey. For example, content about a problem that your customer is experiencing would be appropriate for the awareness stage. But content about the solution is more appropriate for the interest and desire stages.And content about your product or services is best for the action stage.There are also content formats that work better in different stages.For example, educational blogs work better in the aware stage.But in the desire stage where a customer knows they want a particular product or service,but are still trying to decide between vendors,a competitor matrix might work best.While on the action stage,a customer is ready to buy donate or subscribe.So this is where you'll want content focused on what the customer needs to take the action like a clear checkout process. Finally, in the post-action stage a customer has already committed and is open to next steps. This is where you'll want content focused on what the customer needs after they took action. Like an email on how to care for their product. These are not bright lines and the formats can move around.Ultimately the topic of the content should drive where it's used in the customer journey. Remember you're creating content for the customer. So always keep their needs in mind. 

Hero, Hub, Hygiene Content

Hero - Larger Content & Lasts Longer, Usually Only 2-3 Times a Year Like A New Product Launch Etc
Hub - Regular Basic Usually Based On The Customer Points and Pain Points
Hygiene - Usually The How to Types, Tutorials And FAQ's

You may be wondering after understanding my customer persona where they are on the customer journey and what content I already have, where do I start with content creation? There are a number of ways but one way is to organize your content creation efforts around three types of content; hero, hub and hygiene content. Hero, hub and hygiene type content can each be on a topic or formatted such that it fits at any one of the different stages of the customer journey. Hero content is large scale and a form of content that will last a long time. You would put this type of content out only 2-3 times a year. It can be about a major conference or large product launch. BambooHR created hero content for its Elevate conference, the largest virtual HR conference. It has a page of its website designated to the big event full of speaker profiles and presentation slides.Hub content is content developed on a regular basis like a blog, is primarily focused on customer issues and pain points. Square, a credit card reader for small businesses created a unique content hub called a town square. It's a resource center for growing businesses with valuable content SMBs can use like how to do better social media marketing and whether a company holiday party is tax deductible.Hygiene is content that customers will search for like product tutorials, how to information or frequently asked questions. Keurig the coffee maker created hygiene content for its customers to help them understand how to replace the water filter in their machine. The video entitled "How To Use The Keurig庐 2.0 Water Filter," addresses a frequently asked question and makes it easy to follow along.To start, plan at least one piece of content for each category,hero, hub and hygiene and then build from there.

Let's quickly recap this lesson.You need to know why you're creating content and have a plan.Content creation should match your customer persona and journey. Use Hero, Hub, and Hygiene content type classifications to organize your content. We've just scratched the surface on content creation. Did you know there are techniques you can use to make your content stand out? That's next.