Content Marketing is a powerful online advertising method for generating targeted traffic, building relationships with your target audience, increasing brand awareness and boosting sales. It takes time to build a successful Content Marketing campaign because it requires the consistent engagement of the target audience with the content you are providing. There are four elements of Content Marketing which include: research, engagement, conversion and return on investment (ROI). All four factors must be considered when formulating your Content Marketing strategy. As you implement Content Marketing throughout your business, you will be collecting data on each of these four elements and using them to guide your Content Marketing strategy.

Researching is an inbound marketing tactic which brings in qualified leads at a faster pace. If the Content Marketing strategy incorporates research into the mix, the results can be exponential. By engaging in comprehensive research, you will gather useful data on consumers, their preferences, buying habits and search engine results. This data will then enable you to understand where your customers are coming from, what searches they conduct to locate your business and how you can better serve those consumers.

Content Marketing also includes the practice of keyword research. The right Content Marketing strategy will allow you to rank in the search engines for specific key phrases which are relevant to your target audience. You can also use this same Content Marketing strategy to rank in the search engines for relative key phrases that you do not necessarily identify with your business but that are used by your target audience to find your business. For instance, if you sell dog supplies, you could incorporate keywords like “pet supplies” into your Content Marketing strategy and drive targeted traffic to a landing page offering dog supplies, dog training books or dog agility training videos. The key to success is in finding phrases that are relative to your business but which offer benefits to your target audience.

A final step in content marketing is creating user generated content. The ideal customer of your business is one who engages with your content and shares it with others. The ideal customer is different to your typical customer in a number of ways. You want to engage your ideal customer but you also want to encourage your typical customers to engage with your content.

In order to create content marketing which engages your ideal customer, engage your ideal customer first. You need to get your content creation ready in advance so that you have time to create content for social media sites, blog platforms and other online venues before you launch your new product or service. In addition, engage your ideal customer with an email campaign prior to launching your product or service. You want to build brand awareness about your brand before you start selling. Your brand awareness is equivalent to having loyal customers and content creation is the first step in building brand awareness and then, loyal customers.

It is not enough to engage your audience, you must engage your audience first. You can engage your audience by producing high quality content marketing which engages your audience first. You can then use email campaigns to further engage your audience and as you know, email campaigns are the most effective online advertising tool you can have at your disposal. The bottom line is that content marketing works and if your content marketing efforts do not work, you should consider reworking your marketing efforts. Keep these simple steps in mind and you will be on the right track to creating an engaging audience which will lead to loyal customers.