Content Marketing Blueprint Personal Use Ebook

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Introduction

There are several ways you can present your company and products to the world. Some businesses use nothing but text-based content. Perhaps the most effective tool for getting your products and services in the hands of your prospects is with videos. Podcasts have exploded in popularity the last few years, largely because they allow listeners to consume content while doing other things, like driving to work or working out at the gym.

All of these are different ways to market your business. Marketing can be described as the method or methods you use to tell people about your brand, offer your products to the world, find new customers and keep your current customers happy. You do this with different forms of content, like blog posts or podcast episodes. As with any worthwhile endeavor, a clearly defined plan of action for marketing your content almost always delivers better results than a distracted, disjointed attempt with no plan in place.

In other words, your business can benefit from a content marketing blueprint. That's exactly what this special report gives you. In it, you'll learn exactly what content marketing is and how it can benefit your business. You will discover that by answering 5 simple groups of questions, you create the bones of your content marketing strategy. Every business is uniquely different. This means when you move through the five stages of a content marketing blueprint creation, you end up with a marketing strategy which is uniquely suited to your business and your needs.

Finally, we will share with you some proven resources and tools that make understanding content marketing and implementing it much easier, no matter what business you are in or what you are trying to accomplish. Your report closes with a list of 10 top practices for creating a successful content marketing blueprint. Let's get started helping you grow your business with a successful content marketing blueprint by defining this powerful and popular marketing strategy.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing has been around for a long time. As long as there has been a product to sell or a service to advertise, spoken or written content has been used to spread the word. Incidentally, one content marketing plan or approach may be vastly different from another. For this reason, if you ask 10 different professional marketers to define content marketing, you are likely to get 10 separate responses.

If you ask the Content Marketing Institute, they will give you the following definition:

"Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action."

For a simpler definition, consider content marketing as a way of creating and marketing different types of content to help you build your business. That content may be text-based, print media, video, or audio. Your content may be distributed online or off and could take the form of folders and flyers, blog posts and articles, images, infographics and digital posters, videos, e-books, webinars or podcasts. You may create your own content, or let your happy clients and customers make marketable content in the form of testimonials and interviews.

The content marketing blueprint you create using this guide will be catered to your unique business and needs. The many benefits of content marketing are as diverse as the different types of content you can use to receive those benefits. Let’s explore just a few of the top rewards offered by a smart content marketing plan.

9 Ways Content Marketing Can Help Your Company

Traditional business owners often don't believe that content marketing is a "real thing" that can benefit their businesses. They have been implementing a marketing plan a certain way for the last several years or decades and see no need to change gears. However, marketing methods are constantly changing, as is their effectiveness. The first business owners to embrace the Internet enjoyed a global reach and saw their businesses explode, especially when their competitors were slow to jump on board the new technology.

The first bloggers to the Internet found sales and profits rather easy, and once everyone else started blogging, those early adopters had already established reputations as leaders in their fields. Writing blog posts is just one type of content creation. You can use a blog to build your email list, generate leads or sell products. There are a lot of benefits offered by content marketing, including the following 9 rewards this marketing strategy offers.

1. Improved Sales and Profits – It doesn't really matter what type of market you are in, at some point you're going to have to make a profit to stay in business. A smart content marketing strategy identifies what types of content produce the most sales and profits for your company.

2. You are Perceived as an Authority in Your Field – Social media posts, Amazon Kindle e-books, physical books, podcast episodes and dozens of other types of content boost the perception that you are a leader in your field. People prefer to do business with the best of the best, and smart content marketing places that desirable tag on you rather than your competition.

3. You Solve Big Problems for Your Prospects – When you answer the biggest questions on the minds of your prospects regarding your marketplace or niche, you make lifelong fans. You can use content to solve the big problems that keep your prospects up at night, and when you do so, both you and your prospects benefit.

4. Improved Search Engine Rankings and More Traffic – Keeping the search engines happy is important for generic, free traffic. The less money you have to pay for traffic, the more capital you can direct towards other areas of your business. Value-based, high-quality content can enrich your readers and viewers while also answering the needs of search engine algorithms, and improved traffic is the result.

5. Effective Data Collection – Polls, surveys, and contests are perfect for finding out what's on the minds of your prospects. Blog and social media posts generate comments that reveal important information that can help you grow your business. These are just a few ways that content creates relevant data you can use to achieve a number of business goals.

6. You Make a Good Connection – When you connect deeply with your audience, they remember you. People do business with individuals and companies they like, respect, and admire. Content can help you make a good connection with your prospects, and ongoing communication can mean a customer for life.

7. Build your Email List – Building and nurturing a list of contacts is extremely important, whether you have a big or small business. Podcast episodes, YouTube videos, opt-in bribes and Facebook advertisements are just a few types of content that allow you to build an email list, so you can continue to market to your prospects.

8. Generate Leads – Without new prospects, your business won't grow. Landing pages, autoresponder sequences, blog posts and other similar types of content can generate leads to keep your sales funnel filled.

9. Client Retention and Satisfaction – You should always be working to attract new customers. Your current customers should not be ignored, however. Someone who has already done business with you is more likely to make additional purchases in the future. Communicating with your customers also minimizes returns and boosts positive word of mouth advertising.

Building Your Content Marketing Blueprint

This chapter will outline the steps you need to follow to create your content marketing blueprint. There is no one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter strategy that works for every company or entrepreneur. You may not use types of content that are absolutely essential to another business. This means your formula for creating and presenting content to grow your company and reach your business goals is going to be unique. To discover a successful content marketing plan, you need to answer a series of questions. You also need to evaluate your content from time to time, to see if it is producing the intended results. The first step to developing a successful content marketing blueprint is to answer the following 5 groups of questions.

1. Niche down to discover exactly who your prospects are. Who is my laser targeted audience? What does my "perfect prospect" look like? What is the narrow consumer base that can benefit most from your products and services? If you go too broad you can get lost in a sea of competition, and the more narrowly you focus your content marketing efforts, the better your results.

2. Identify the story of your brand, your content marketing mission statement. Are my products or services unique? What do I offer that is different from everything else that is already out there? What makes my business a smarter choice for my prospects than my competitors? What value do I offer my customers? What are the big problems that keep my prospective customers up at night, and how can I solve them?

3. Before you start writing blog posts and making videos, ask yourself why you are creating content and how it will help your audience. Why are you writing blog posts, creating videos and spending time on social media? How are your different pieces of content going to benefit your readers, viewers or listeners? Before you begin churning out content, you need to have a targeted goal or result you hope that content can help you reach.

4. How are you going to create and distribute your content? What specific schedule are you going to use so you are consistently developing and sharing valuable, high-quality content? This is the "how" of the content marketing process. What specific scheduling blueprint or formula do you need to create so your content helps you achieve your business goals, and so that same content becomes invaluable to your prospective clients and current customers?

5. Measure and evaluate, make any necessary changes. Is your landing page converting at a high rate? Are your email open rates where they need to be? Are your blog posts generating the amount of generic traffic you had hoped for? Is your video sales letter turning enough tire kickers into buyers to produce the profits you need? Here is where you gauge how well your content is performing, so you can focus on what is working and retool or abandon content marketing strategies that are underperforming.

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