Content Marketing: The 5 Essential Stages You Need to Master

Content marketing is an effective way to build your brand’s awareness, authority, and engagement. Well-created and promoted content can also boost conversions and revenue.

However, very few marketers know how to leverage content marketing effectively.

Truth be told, content marketing can be tricky since it involves many stages. A single misstep can decrease your content marketing ROI substantially.

The solution?

Understand the end-to-end content marketing process. Read all about it in this post.

How to Master Content Marketing in 5 Steps

To do content marketing like a pro, you don’t need a particular degree or years of experience. Just diligently follow the five essential steps outlined below.

Step 1: Content Research and Planning

To serve on-target content, you need to REALLY understand your target audience. You also need to figure out their preferred platforms and content types. Once you have these insights, you can create an effective content strategy.

Gather customer insights by:

• Studying your consumers’ online behavior
• Digging into your CRM systems
• Conducting surveys and quizzes using the available survey tool.

Using the insights, create detailed customer personas. Then, create a content strategy with attainable goals and trackable metrics.

Step 2: Content Creation

Once you know the kind of content your target audience digs, start with the task of content creation.

But how?

• Use in-house team members for copywriting.
• Leverage professional tools to craft content.
• Curate relevant, authoritative content.

Write on-trend and keyword-rich content that can rank well and deliver value to readers. Build a content calendar to plan different content types and formats.

Step 3: Content Scheduling and Publishing

The next step is to schedule and publish content according to your content calendar.

To do so, keep the following points in mind:

• To maintain posting-frequency, auto-publish content using tools.
• Publish more content on your target audience’s favorite platforms.

Step 4: Content Promotion and Distribution

It’s not sufficient to publish content and wait for people to discover it. You need to promote it aggressively on social platforms and aggregator sites. Keyword optimize your content to improve its visibility on the SERPs.

What else?

You can also guest post on authoritative websites and include content links in emails.

Step 5: Analysis and Strategy Revision

It’s essential to track your content’s performance and identify improvement areas. During this crucial stage, you realign and sharpen your content strategy for the future.

By spotting and plugging holes in your strategy, your content marketing efforts can produce the desired ROI. You focus on content, audience, and platforms that work for your brand and help you meet your business goals.

Ready to Nail Content Marketing?

If done well, content marketing can be a gamechanger in your digital marketing strategy. You just need a fail-proof strategy, which is precisely what we have outlined in this post.

To learn more about these five content-marketing stages, plus pro-tips and tools, check out this infographic first published on my blog ShaneBarker.com.

Read more from Shane Barker here.