
Content marketing is a strategic businesses technique used by marketers in order to influence users to take the desired actions.
An average person saw around 2,000 ads per day some 30 years ago. Now they see over 5,000 ads per day.
Why such a sudden surge? Content marketing and inbound marketing are one of the main reasons for it.
Whether it is an Amazon email that you just received in your inbox saying that you can buy the items remaining in your shopping cart or the thanking message you received after riding an Uber, these are a few examples of content marketing. They help businesses build trust and loyalty for their brands.
This article on how to leverage content marketing for brand building will walk you through the following aspects:
· What is content marketing
· Benefits of content marketing
· How you can craft a content marketing strategy for your business
What is content marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that helps businesses focus on creating and distributing unique and appropriate content for a defined audience in order to drive profitable customer action.
An effective content marketing campaign needs to be well-crafted and cleverly planned as per the needs of the business. Only 9% of B2C marketers are confident of their content marketing strategy.
This means, there is a huge scope for improvement.
The successful implementation of a content marketing strategy can be achieved by documenting, executing, and measuring it effectively.
Advantages
Content marketing seems to have become the most talked-about jargon in the marketing industry. And the fun fact is that 94% of B2B small business marketers use content marketing to grow their business.
Irrespective of the size of the business, content marketing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 92% of marketers reported that content is a business asset to their companies.
As Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of CMI says, “content marketing is not easy because you actually have to listen to your customers and know what their challenges are.” Hence, content marketing is the only option.
More than 56% of the businesses are keen to increase their content creation expenditure.
But why?
Content Marketing helps in:
1. Building brand awareness: Undoubtedly, brand awareness forms a critical component in B2B marketing goals with 84% of the marketers rating it as a top priority.
2. Lead generation: When it comes to ROI on the marketing expenditure then content marketing provides three times more leads per dollar spent as compared to paid search marketing. Now, isn’t that a good reason to focus more on content marketing?

3. Customer retention: Content marketing is an integral part of inbound marketing. With inbound marketing, brands nurture leads for their first purchase and customers for cross-selling or up-selling opportunities. 55% of marketers focus on blog creation as their priority for inbound marketing.
4. Better sales: 90% of B2B buyers say that online content has influenced their purchase decision, so why wouldn’t you leverage that?
Hope you got a good idea as to how content marketing can be leveraged to accomplish your business goals.
But in order to make this work, you need to have a content strategy in place.
How to make an effective content marketing strategy?

Despite all the efforts, the benefits of content marketing can be reaped only after some time. To expect instant results from a content marketing campaign would be stupidity for any marketer or a small enterprise with a limited budget.
Do you know that 63% of businesses do not have a documented content marketing strategy? Here’s how you can ensure that your business does not make the same mistake.
These are the following steps that one needs to keep in mind:
1. Goal or objective of your content marketing strategy: As a business, you need to define a clear goal for your content strategy. Is it brand awareness or lead generation, or something else? With time, your goal could change and accordingly you need to adapt your content creation with it.
2. Understand your target audience: Content should always be created keeping in mind the ideal customer profile. A buyer persona helps one identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, demographics, interests, behaviours, desires, pain points, etc. There are various templates available online which can help you create a buyer persona.
3. What problem are you trying to solve: Addressing your target audience’s pain points and providing a unique solution to them should be a key intent for content creation.
4. What are the different content formats you should use: There are different content formats that you can use – text, image, graphics, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. Not all your target audience would be present on all social media platforms. Hence, you need to tailor your content as per the preferred formats of content used on such platforms.
According to a survey by Tabular Insights, 64% of viewers are likely to buy a product online after watching branded social videos. As per Animoto’s report, 75% of millennials watch video content daily. So, for example, if your target audience consists of millennials, then maybe you need to prioritize video content over other formats of content.
5. Which social media channels to use for content publishing: No matter how well-crafted your content is, it is of no use if you don’t use the right social media channels to publish your content. Understanding where your target audience lies and where they spend their time online and delivering content accordingly is a critical decision.
6. Preparing a content calendar: Content publishing is no rocket science but strategically publishing it, is indeed an art. Not only do you need to keep track of the content creation and its formats but also what time it is suitable to publish on which social media platform. So, a content calendar turns out to be a resourceful tool.
You don’t need any fancy software to make one, just a simple excel template of the calendar dates and days with details of the content to be published can be your ally. It makes your work sorted and organized.
7. Measuring the impact of content and audit: Once the content is published, you need to review it as well and see how it performed and what are its engagement levels. If the engagement rates are lower than expected, then make changes in your content and keep experimenting till you get the desired results.
Here’s an example of a great content marketing campaign of recent times.
Have a look at this IKEA’s last year video content of IKEA Place. Now, you must be thinking what is so great about this content?
Well, if you saw clearly, the content serves two purposes –
· It finely addresses their customer’s top concern which is how a piece of furniture will look at their home or workplace.
· It allows IKEA to put across its value proposition.
Conclusion
Even bigger brands make mistakes and there’s a lot to learn from them. One of the recent failures in content marketing was Dove’s ad campaign, where a black woman transforms into a white woman after using Dove’s body lotion.
The backlash it received from so many people from across the world, made Dove even release a public apology on Facebook and they removed the campaign from social media.
Hence, it becomes more important to be careful with the sentiments of people across the world and be empathetic towards them and create a campaign that makes people talk about it in a positive way.
When it comes to making a positive impact, then we at Dramantram, not only believe in complete accountability for our actions but also, strive to work for better growth opportunities for our client partners.
So if you are struggling to make a content marketing strategy for your business, then get in touch with us. We can help you sail the boat.
Also, do tell us in the comments which of these techniques are you going to leverage?
**Dramantram (Pronounced as Dra-Mann-Tram) is a video production, communication design, digital marketing, and concept photography company that takes a human-centred, design-based approach to innovate, create and communicate. Our flexible approach works in tandem with creativity and innovation.
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