A complete content marketing strategy walkthrough

Nowadays, any company that does not want to be invisible must adapt to the new needs. To do this, it has to enter the world of digital marketing. eCommerce is the order of the day. If your company is not on the internet, it does not exist. And to achieve this web visibility, we must have a good content marketing strategy.

what is content marketing?

The content marketingis a series of marketing techniques that consist of creating relevant and useful content for our target audience, which will help us to obtain a greater number of leads and customers. With this, we will obtain valuable sales opportunities that are truly interested in our content. These leads will have a more positive perception of the brand. They will feel cared for by it and, in the long run, will generate more business and customer loyalty.

To understand content marketing, it is also necessary to understand the evolution of advertising. We are a long way from the intrusive advertising in which we were bombarded with banal information, which may or may not interest the user. With content marketing, the aim is to provoke valuable engagement in the target audience, which will increase both your leads and your number of customers.

In the internet age, the audience is the one who decides what to consume, when to consume it and how to consume it. Therefore, it is absurd to create content that does not interest your audience. You must adapt and create exactly what they want so that they trust you and you manage to capture them.

If as a brand you rely on creating content that reflects well what your products are like and what values your company has, what you are creating is content that does not interest your audience at all. Stop talking about yourself and create content that is really useful for your target audience. Content marketing is not only focused on selling the product, but on attracting a new customer, on solving a doubt or giving them the solution to one of their problems.

With this, you are not only making your audience happy, you are appearing with a conciliatory message in front of them at the moment they need it most, which will make them buy much more than if your message was intrusive and was only dedicated to selling and commenting on how good your product is. That is why content marketing is a great advantage in terms of sales.

Not only are you appearing at the right time, but you are also generating trust and sympathy in your customers that will make them choose your brand over an unknown brand at the time of purchase.

In short, it is very clear that content marketing is based on creating content that is relevant to your buyer persona and thus arouse their interest at the right time.

Now that you know what content marketing is, let's take a look at what content marketing is NOT.

what isn't content marketing?

1. Focusing only on writing articles

When we think of content marketing, the first thing that comes to mind is to write many articles and blog posts related to our brand, which have the same tone as our company. But content marketing is much more than that, it is to generate traffic within the web, and once inside, the content must be good enough to convert that traffic into leads. On the other hand, this does not end here, once we have the leads, we have to focus on our lead nurturing strategy to accompany the customer with our content until the time to close the sale.

2. Not to be confused with native advertising

It can be confused with content marketing, but it has two key elements that make the difference. In native advertising what you do is pay to be positioned in a media outside the company. In contrast, in content marketing, that valuable content is published on the company's own channels. On the other hand, in native advertising, the audience that is used already exists, i.e. they are not generating a new audience from scratch as is done in content marketing.

3. It is not about selling

don't use your blog to sell! Content marketing is not about selling, it's about helping the user to find the content they want, so adding hidden advertising for your brand within your content is completely out of place and can even make the user feel violent and influence their decision.

4. It is not the same as inbound marketing

Content marketing is inbound marketingso what do they have in common? We'll show you in the following section.

what does this have to do with inbound marketing?

Within digital marketing, the main strategy is inbound marketing, and within this, we have content marketing.

To understand the relationship between the two, the first thing we are going to do is to define what inbound marketing is and what an inbound strategy consists of.

Inbound is a methodology, any marketing strategy that attracts the attention of the target audience, always without being intrusive or invading them, as they will feel that we are interrupting their experience. In other words, the main objective is not to bombard users with aggressive advertising, but to attract the target audience in a subtle and natural way.

Inbound marketing has four basic pillars to achieve its objectives:

• Attract: Here there is already a link with content marketing, since inbound marketing is based on attracting your buyer persona through content that is relevant and manages to capture the interest of your target audience.

• Convert: In this phase, the most important thing is to convert as many users as possible to leads, with this what we are getting is that they trust more in the brand and end up becoming potential customers.

• Sell: If after converting your users you have been able to see, through the information they leave on your page, that they are interested in your products or services, the next step is to show them that they have the solution to all their problems and with this to close the sale, convincing them that it is the best.

• Loyalty: We cannot forget that the buying process never ends with the sale. Inbound marketing aims to achieve a lasting relationship between the brand and the customer. With this we build customer loyalty and forge a relationship with them that will make them trust us for future purchases.

Therefore, content marketing is one of the parts of inbound marketing, because through it we manage to attract an audience, gain their trust and get their loyalty. That is why, regarding the relationship between the two, we can say that content marketing is a gear in the machinery of inbound marketing. To be concise, the first of the gears. And this is because working well your content within the inbound marketing strategy will bring you many benefits within your business.

Advantages of content marketing

At this point what we will show you are all the advantages that you will have within your company if you decide to start your content marketing strategy, seeing the main advantages it offers, you will not be able to resist it. On the other hand, according to a report within Neil Patel's blog, we can say that 93% of B2B marketers use this methodology to acquire customers.

1. Increase traffic

In this new internet era and thanks to new technologies, most people use the internet to search for the information they need and they do it in search engines like Google. Therefore, creating relevant content for users is the best way to position yourself in Google in the top positions, and SEO positioning is key in our content marketing strategy. It is the best way to provide your audience with a door through which they can enter directly to your content of interest.

2. Increase your brand awareness

As you add more and more content to your page, what you achieve is to position yourself in the minds of users and competitors as an authority in the field, becoming a reference for them in the sector. With this, what you get is that the name of your company is familiar to potential customers and thus will be more likely to end up coming to your company when they want to hire a service.

3. You gain trust

By creating and publishing quality content on a constant and regular basis, what we are achieving is that users fully trust the brand, because if they are willing to help the user without receiving anything in return, the service they will give when they are paid will be much better.

4. Increase engagement

If the publications that you generate within your website or blog with the content marketing strategy are constant, what you will achieve is that users will visit your website or blog much more frequently. Thanks to these frequent visits, you will educate your audience, they will see you with a better image and you will gain closeness with them. What we are creating with this whole process is a brand lover, we create loyalty among users and they end up becoming advocates of the brand itself.

5. Generate sales

Generating sales is not always the primary objective of content marketing. If you focus your content production on guiding your leads through the buying process, you will get them to make the decision to buy. If your strategy is good and you have followed it point by point, the sales opportunities will come sooner rather than later.

If you know your your buyer personawhich is fundamental, it will be very easy to attract them as you will know exactly what content they are looking for and where they are looking for it.

This way we optimise the work of the sales department, where they already know which leads are of value and can convert them into customers, saving time in the search and keeping only those leads that we will almost certainly convert into sales. But sales are only one of the objectives of content marketing. If you are clear about where you want to go, you will get there.

6. Generate leads

Once you have attracted a good amount of traffic to your website, the goal becomes converting them. You still don't have any information about them, and without their email and name, how are you going to target them and send them the right content? That's why generating leads is always one of the main objectives of a business. You can't start with your content marketing strategy if you don't have a way to send that content to your potential customers. So, attract traffic with your content, but convert it into leads. Otherwise, the work will be for nothing.

7. Increase lifetime-value

Lifetime-value can be defined as the amount that a customer spends with the company in total. An example would be: if your company's customers have purchased a service for €50 on average twice, the lifetime-value would be €100. This point is important because it is much simpler and you invest less. In other words, it will be easier for a customer to make a repeat purchase with us than for a customer to purchase a product from the company. Content marketing will always be a plus for lifetime-value, you will end up getting the customer to commit to the company.

8. Increase your database

By providing the user with quality content, what we are achieving is to attract them to the point where they leave their details for us. Thanks to this, what we are achieving is a huge increase in the number of conversions, which greatly increases the number of leads, thus expanding the database.

9. Better planning

If you have a well-executed content plan, you're a long way down the road. If you know where your marketing is going and what you need to do at any given moment, you won't have to worry about it. It's a lot of work, especially at the beginning, when it comes to defining your content marketing strategy, but in the long run you won't have to worry about anything. Everything will already be planned.

10. You reduce costs

Within every company there are a lot of metrics, one of them, widely used in the area of marketing and sales, is the CAC, also called Customer Acquisition Cost. With it, what we can calculate is the value that we as a company are investing to generate a new customer.

Logically, the lower the cost per customer acquisition, the less we are investing, so the more beneficial it will be for the company. If what a customer generates is more than what we are spending to get it, we will be reducing costs and obtaining benefits.

In order to achieve all these advantages, it is not enough to start a content marketing strategy, you have to work the strategy rigorously so that all these advantages are fulfilled. The better planned the strategy is, the more beneficial it will be for the company.

why is content marketing important?

After a lot of marketing strategies and aggressive actions over the years, inbound marketing finally appears, which consists of attracting the customer in a subtle way, how do you do it? Through a content strategy that brings value to that customer. Content marketing is to renew or die. That is the importance. In order to relate to the consumer, it is necessary to use different communication media and it is important to do so for various reasons:

• You educate the consumer

• You receive feedback from the consumer very quickly

• The company-customer relationship becomes much stronger

• You create a community with your customers by sharing emotions with your audience

• Improve conversion rate

• Updated content due to the constant renewal of articles

• Users share relevant information in their networks

Another reason why content marketing is important within your strategy is that it allows you to work on multiple keywords. If you deal with different topics to reach a large number of users, you will increase your chances of appearing in the first search results on Google. SEO is important and should not be left aside within the strategy, it is the one that could increase traffic to your website.

Within SEO positioning, you will achieve better results if you approach it from a long-tail perspective, i.e. search for the long-tail of a keyword and write related articles about it. With this, you will manage to get away from your competition when it comes to positioning yourself at the top of the search engines, as well as achieving multiple results that will also be positioned for your important keyword.

Examples of brands that use it:

1. EAE Business School(Planeta Group)

This is one of the most reputable business schools in Spain and Europe. It has different blogs in which it generates content. It stands out for the large amount of useful content it publishes, such as organised events or specific support material to boost the closing of sales.

2. Lekue

We are facing one of the eCommerce that has grown the most in recent years. Lekue is dedicated to the sale of kitchen utensils and they have added a blog in which they introduce recipes, tips and tricks. This content strategy achieves a greater amount of traffic within their website. This strategy is not only focused on the blog articles, we can also see how they extend it to their stands or points of sale, passing, of course, through their products.

3. Australis

This company is dedicated to organising cruises in Patagonia. In the absence of one, it has several blogs in the different languages in which it operates (English, Spanish, German and French). It manages to make its cruises a great experience by creating a good content strategy around it all. It uses videos showing the routes, landscapes that would be passed through in the case of hiring a cruise experience and recordings inside the ship itself.

What it achieves with this is to awaken feelings in the user who is there on holiday, which incites them to want to live the experience.

how to start a content marketing strategy?

We cannot think that a content strategy is based only on writing, that part is secondary, we must take into account the objectives, strategies and metrics. Without all this, the content strategy would be meaningless. If you do not know what to write and where you want to go with it, it will be difficult to achieve good results.

There must be a plan in which you make clear the results you want to achieve. After this, it is convenient to know which path you are going to take to reach those previously set objectives. Finally, you have to know how you are going to measure the process once it is finished.

Starting on the path of content marketing without having previously drawn up a plan is the same as setting sail without sails or an engine. You won't get very far.

We show you the steps to follow to start your marketing strategy.

1. Definition of objectives and KPIs

When you have clear objectives within your strategy, the team in general will be very clear about where they need to get to, how to get there and how to measure the results.

so, let's get down to work and start setting objectives!

Once you have decided which objectives you are going to set within your marketing strategy, you need to define the KPIs, the key performance indicators. To be able to set them easily, the objectives need to be well defined, ideally using the SMART model:

• Specific: It must be a specific objective, be very clear about where we want to get to and define it in the best possible way so that the whole team understands it and knows what their role is in achieving it.

• Measurable: The objectives must be measurable in order to be improved, which is why we must define KPIs.

• Attainable: It must be a realistic objective, that is to say, it must beachievable by the company, otherwise, what we will achieve will be disappointment and we will not make progress with the objectives, focusing on an impossible one.

• Relevant: It must berelevant for the company and for the audience, it must bring something of benefit and help to grow.

• Timely: The most important thing when setting objectives is to set temporary goals. It is more effective to achieve objectives within a fixed period of time. We will be more motivated when it comes to achieving them and they will be better measured.

2. Define your buyer persona

Within your marketing strategy, one of the main objectives is to bring as much traffic as possible to your website, but not just any traffic, it must be quality traffic, and for that we have to know who to target. How do we do that? By defining what our buyer persona is. We are not talking about the same thing when we talk about the target audience. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer. It is semi-fictional because it is created by identifying the traits that your best customers have in common. These should be repeated in future customers, that is the goal to reach our buyer persona. This is achieved by interviewing some of the most loyal customers, thus defining the ideal customer.

3. Tailor your content

You have to be very attentive to the sales funnelin any strategy, and the ideal would be to adapt your content to it. What the funnel is showing us is that of all the people who come to you, only some of them become customers.

The important thing in the funnel is to know how to classify them according to the point of conversion in which they are, so we know what content we have to send them to influence their purchase decision. The basis of content marketing is to generate content that is relevant and of interest to users, so at all times it is a strategic work. You have to know when and how.

4. Define the distribution channels for your content

We have already analysed what our buyer persona is and we have set the path of our sales funnel. It is now time to choose where we are going to pour our content in order to acquire customers, so it is very important to define which channels we are going to use.

The most important thing when determining these channels is to know your buyer persona well. If it is a male between 75 and 90 years old, TikTok is probably a bad idea to transmit those contents. The channels you choose must be channels to which you can dedicate your time, it is better to have only one and dedicate yourself 100% than to have five and be mediocre in four.

We are going to analyse below the channels that exist and the advantages they have:

• Blog: This option is one of the most used by companies. It is one of the bases of your content strategy, since you have the option of displaying information in a large number of formats. It is a channel in which it is easy to get leads since the traffic that appears on the page is entirely yours, i.e. it is not on an external platform as happens in social networks. If there is traffic on your blog, it is because they wanted the information on your blog. Thus, you do not lose audience. Not to mention that creating content on a blog drives almost 4 times more visits per month.

• Social networks: Within any content marketing strategy, it is normal to appear on social networks. The advantages of social networks in this type of strategy are endless. You increase your traffic, your community (creating brand lovers), your engagement, and above all, your sales.

• Videos: In recent years, users have opted for video. The overdose of information to which they are exposed by new technologies, makes them want to consume information in the simplest way possible and a video is the best option for this. Apart from this, it is a good strategy to gain the trust of your followers who will see in you, a brand that cares about the needs of its customers and creates valuable content for users. With videos you can also educate your audience, show your values and show your products. Dare with video! It will increase your traffic as it is easy to consume on all types of devices. What are you waiting for?
  
  

  
  
  

• Interactive website: In the era of new technologies, you have to renew or die. That is why more and more new formats are being created, more and more aimed at users and at converting them. A new and very attractive format for these users is interactive content. This is a new experience for the user as it allows them to interact with the content actively. Thanks to this, not only are we giving the user a new format from which to obtain information, but we can also analyse the behaviour of these users based on how they interact within the page.

Advantages of the interactive page:

- It increases the time spent on the website. This directly influences our SEO positioning, we will appear at the top of the search engines!

- We get very valuable data from our audience, which helps us enormously to optimise our sales strategies.

- The conversion of leads is much higher than in the rest of static pages

- Increase your influence and presence as a brand by adding new formats to your website and be on everyone's lips.

• E-mail: Although this may seem like an outdated strategy, we must say that no, it still works and very well! It is one of the channels that has the highest ROI within a content strategy. It has countless advantages such as the many tools that exist to measure metrics (many of them free), you will have all the data you need at a very low cost.

• Paidadvertising: If you want to give a boost to your strategy, paid online advertising is a great help. Thanks to SEM, you will be able to position yourself in search engines almost immediately, in addition to disseminating your content on the internet and social networks.

• Events: As part of your content marketing strategy, everything you produce can help you get noticed. Collaborations with influencers at events can give you a lot of information about how your strategy is working, as well as help you spread the message that your brand wants to convey.

• Word of mouth: This is not 100% in our hands, but if we provide a good experience to our customers, they will recommend us, and there is no better publicity than a loyal customer or a brand lover.

Once we have seen the channels, let's move on to the content itself.

what kind of content can you create for each stage of the buyer's journey?

1. Infographics

An infographic is one of the best options to send your users a message in a direct and visual way, they are very easy to share and although the audience cannot interact directly with them, they can reach a large number of consumers and even go viral.

2. Blog

We are facing one of the main channels of content marketing. Blogging has countless advantages:

• Help in SEO: If you know what keywords to use and what is the best topic within your blog, you will get a very good position organically within the network.

• Valuable content: Thanks to the blog, what you are achieving is to generate valuable content for your users, which will attract your buyer persona to a greater extent than if the content you publish were not specialised.

• Expert in the sector: By working on specialised content in your sector, what you will be achieving is to make yourself known to your users and your competitors as a reference figure in the subject.

• Own database: Thanks to the blog you will get a lot of traffic to your website and with it, a large number of leads, which end up becoming records within your own database by filling in forms to which the blog redirects you.

3. Podcast

This format is in general terms very similar to the blog, but with the difference of the audio format. That is, it has the same functions and transmits the information in the same way, but in a more innovative way such as audio. This format is becoming more and more fashionable among users, who use it both for information and entertainment. Not to be confused with radio, this digital content is not live, it is available online, users use it to expand their knowledge and learn about new topics.

4. Videos

The star of formats. According to HubSpot research, more than 50% of consumers are interested in watching videos about the products they buy. Video has become the preferred format for users in recent years, in a short time and without the need to think, they have all the information they need to assimilate the message. Apart from this, videos improve your positioning in Google, which rewards this type of format and also improves the mental image that users and competitors have of the brand.

5. Webinars/webinars

The webinar is the trendy format of the moment. It is used to explain any information or hold any event online, which means it is much more convenient as you can do it from home and in your pyjama trousers! It doesn't take up your users' time and is a great help to them, it's all advantages. They won't be able to resist this format.

6. Tutorials

Within the video format, we find tutorials, which are of great help when explaining how certain products work or to make it clear how to purchase a service. If for example you have a computer shop, a tutorial on how to configure a section is of great help, but if on the other hand, your shop is a makeup shop, it can be a great plus to add tutorials on how to use different products and ideas on how to combine them. It will increase your ROI as these videos do not require a large investment and are very useful for your users.

7. Ebooks

Ebooks are becoming more and more fashionable within content marketing strategies. It is a good way to include all the information that the brand wants to teach its audience, using resources such as images or infographics. An ebook is the ideal format to introduce a large amount of information.

The importance of adding visual value to your content

Let's start talking about the importance of video with a statistic, and that is that 40% of people have a better response with video than with text when receiving information.

Adding visual content to your contentyou get to engage them more easily, in less time and most importantly, with better results.

If infographics and informative images are trending, it is simply because users prefer to gather all the information at a glance rather than spending a long time reading text. By adding these infographics, you will be able to increase your conversion rate.

The human brain processes images 60 thousand times faster than text, so in order to make your website content attractive to the user, one of the keys to achieve this is to make sure that your website is visually stunning. This will increase the permanence of users within the website.

These visual campaigns stick in the user's memory for longer, so, at the end of the day, a visual content strategy is the best option in content marketing. They will remember you, they will share you and they will recommend you.

Benefits of visual content:

1. Increases traffic: Adding visual content to your blog, what you get is increased traffic within search engines, as this content is easily shareable within different blogs and platforms. Users find it more useful content than in text format.

2. You manage to create brand lovers: The audience empathises more with audiovisual content than with text. They will identify with it and you will increase your most loyal followers, who will gradually become brand lovers.

3. Improved positioning: Google knows that adding audiovisual content to your website is a valuable effort that requires an investment, so it will end up positioning you in the best positions by rewarding that effort.

4. Low cost: Creating a decent audiovisual content is simple, creating an attractive content is within the reach of anyone. There are hundreds of applications, both for computers and for your mobile device, so we can edit our audiovisual content in a very short time and on our own phone!

5. Increase engagement: By adding audiovisual content to your strategy, what you are achieving is to strengthen the links with your followers by offering them quality content in which you provide them with information in a synthesised way. This attention you give to your followers will end up being reflected in the likes, comments and shares of your followers.

6. It improves the understanding of the message: A message is much more understandable if you add visual elements than if it were just text. For example: If you write a text explaining how to set up the new independent hoover, it will be much less understandable than if you make a video in which you explain how to do it visually.

how to disseminate your content?

The most important part of your content strategy is not just creating content. You can have the best content in the world in the most appropriate format, but if you do not disseminate it well, you will not get traffic or reach your target audience. For your strategy to be effective, you have to analyse the viable channels for disseminating your content.

• Look for allies: The more dissemination the better, so finding allies is a great strategy to reach a larger number of users. A message will not reach the same people if it is spread by one company as if it is spread by several. Commenting on other blogs, sharing posts from other companies... this way you will get feedback from other companies and you will support each other by spreading each other's content.

• Use an appropriate tone: You have to remember who your buyer persona is and adapt to it. It is not the same to be addressing students who are learning than experts on a subject. You also have to take into account the formality with which you address your audience, do not be too colloquial or they will not take you seriously, but do not be too serious or the public will not be able to empathise with you.

• Email marketing: Take advantage of the benefits of email marketing. In your content marketing strategy you can not miss one of the pillars of the dissemination of content, yes, you read that right, email marketing is not dead, using it with caution without being intrusive or burdening the user, it can be the best way to convert leads.

• Own media: Your own channels of diffusion, so you manage all the diffusion of your content in all its phases, but often it is not the best idea as it is more complicated for a brand to spread by itself.

• Paid media: This content is paid, i.e. we invest in order to advertise. These are SEM ads, sponsored ads or promoted publications. This is beneficial for positioning in a short time and to better segment your audience, this action carried out meticulously can be very efficient.

• Earned media: These are those actions carried out by the followers or subscribers of a company, that is to say, they are the interactions that make the content visible and constantly moving. It is a feedback we receive from our followers that helps us to find out if the content we are disseminating is being liked by users or not. This advertising that our most loyal customers do to us must be taken care of, and we achieve this by taking care of our followers. If a follower uploads a story with something about our brand, Re-upload it!

If you want your content marketing strategy to be successful, you have to take into account all these points and disseminate your content very well, as it is the most important part of your strategy.

How to carry out your content marketing strategy

Now that we know all about the content marketing strategy, the different ways to execute it and in which channels, let's go on to define the steps to follow within the strategy itself. We already know how to start it, but we don't know the rest. Here we leave you with all the steps to follow from the beginning to the end of the strategy.

1. Set the objectives

As we said before, the first step is always to set the goals we want to reach, having this very clear, we will have a great part of the way done. These goals should be explained in detail and should be planned to improve our KPIs. Goals within a business can improve the brand image and even increase sales.

2. Determine the KPIs

To check that these objectives are being met, we need them to be measurable, so we need to choose different indicators to measure whether or not the actions we are taking are producing results.

3. Choosing content channels

We have already seen all the channels and formats through which we can disseminate our content, so, knowing all that and knowing our buyer persona, it should be easy to choose the most appropriate way for this message to reach the audience.

4. Deciding on the type of content

We are not only talking about the channels that we are going to use, we must also take into account which formats are most appropriate to reach my audience, and above all to facilitate the dissemination of the content.

5. Budget

This is one of the fundamental points within the strategy, as without it it will be very difficult to make decisions and we will not be able to measure the results in terms of profitability.

6. Create and distribute content

Once we have planned the whole strategy, the most important step is the creation of the content itself and its distribution through the channels already established. For this purpose, a calendar is usually created in which we adjust each publication to the different objectives of the content marketing strategy.

7. Analyse and measure the results

The strategy does not end with the distribution of content under any circumstances. We set the KPIs at the beginning so that we can measure during the strategy if we are meeting our objectives, and what better time to check this than once the strategy is finished? We will see if it is bearing fruit, where we are failing and to what extent, so that we can solve it.

Strategies to attract customers with content marketing

• Invest in SEO: Organic positioning for content marketing is the key, it will give you more prestige and differentiate you from your competition. To do this we will invest our time and effort in positioning ourselves in the first results of Google. One of the ways in which we can achieve this is by publishing content regularly. Google rewards working with content on a regular basis. In addition, so that your content can be easily found, it is very convenient to tag and classify it well, always following some positioning guidelines.

• Focus on conversion: A visit to your website in itself is not going to generate profits, but leads do have value, visitors to your site have to become contacts that expand your database. That is why you need a good strategy, you need to stop having visitors and start having leads.

• Long term: You have to think about your content strategy in the long term, that is to say, if from the beginning you have a calendar with the rhythm of your publications, you will be organised in advance and you will not make mistakes.

• Create quality content: It is not enough to publish a lot of content frequently. The content you create must be quality content. What you need now is for users to want to continue consuming it and to recommend you.

Difficulties you may encounter

As we have already said, planning is key to a content marketing strategy, otherwise many problems can arise, for example:

1. Not knowing how to generate relevant content for your buyer persona

This is one of the biggest problems in your content marketing strategy. If you don't generate interesting content to attract your target audience, you will lose your audience and the attention they pay to your brand, so you will lose visits to your website and therefore leads and sales.

2. Not producing enough content

This issue directly affects the long-term strategy, if we do not have enough content, we will lose customers in the long run. From the very beginning, we must invest time and dedication and know when we are going to have to generate content again in order to plan for it.

3. Failing to generate content throughout the sales process

Often we have a lot of content planned for certain phases but in others we have little, which can cause problems at important moments in the funnel, and cause us to lose our leads at an advanced point in the buying process.

How to measure results

One of the most important points within the content marketing strategy is to knowing how to measure resultsto be able to find out if our strategy is bearing fruit or not, for this we show you a list with the five general indicators:

1. Audiences: One of the most important points to know if your content marketing strategy is working is to see if it has a good SEO positioning. In that case, you increase your organic traffic and your audiences. Keep in mind that this way you get your own audiences, without the need for paid advertising, so SEO positioning is the best important investment you should make.

2. Viralisation on social networks: If your content is of high quality, your own users will spread it on social networks. This is a good way to find out if the content you generate is liked by your audience. Using hashtags is a plus here.

3. Comments: Another very simple way to find out how your strategy is going is to analyse if users have created a debate around your content. The comments they leave within the blog or the page, as well as the number of views are a good feedback when analysing our results.

4. Sentiments: By looking at the comments and reactions of our users we can see what feelings our strategy has aroused in them. These can be positive or negative and this is a key indicator to analyse the results that our content is giving in networks.

5. Cost: The ROI we get after our content marketing strategy must be positive, which means that what the user brings us is more beneficial than what we spend to get it. If not, you must optimise your strategy or you will be losing money.

In conclusion, content marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing. Thanks to it we will increase not only traffic to our website, but also quality leads, and thanks to those quality leads, we will increase sales. Know your buyer persona, set goals and the rest will follow. And you, what are you waiting for to start investing in your content marketing strategy?