The above definition of Content Marketing (CM) covers the true essence of what CM stands for. In simpler terms, Content Marketing is the use of relevant and valuable content for the audience. Its motive is to provide them with information that would be beneficial. Most of the companies are unable to provide relevant and useful content to their audience. It ends up looking like spam to them and damages the company’s credibility. The reason why so many people swear Content Marketing to be a useful tool is that it benefits us in a lot of ways:

– providing an increase in credibility,

– boost in sales,

– increment of lead conversions,

– and a hike of brand-loyal customers.

CM nowadays helps create a more credible image than advertising or direct marketing. With increased technological development, there is easy access for consumers to keep themselves updated. It makes them more reluctant to direct marketing or advertising techniques.

With Content Marketing, the customer feels that the company provides more than just a product/service. It makes them feel the need of the companies for engagement. Providing relevant information makes the company more credible in front of the customer’s eyes. The content a company would provide is something its consumers would relate to and spread awareness to others about the same. So even if someone is not your direct customer, content marketing helps to spread awareness of your company, which is the first step to becoming salient.

Content Marketing helps us to extract benefits that help the company and consumers in the long run like:

• good knowledge of the buyer segment
• a customized approach to reach customer’s interests
• catering to their emotional needs, as most buyers connect with the qualities brand has to offer.

The advantage of knowing what your customer base is helps companies stay relevant to their needs and expectations. Now that we know what content marketing is and why it is the need of the era, let’s see the three Strategies to elevate your Content Marketing in 2021:

Dig in deep, research your audience:

No argument seems valid without immense facts and research backing it up. The same goes for knowing our audience. One cannot make the mistake of only assuming what their audiences might need or want.

Our First Content Marketing Strategy is to define our Target Audience. Our audience should be classified by their demographics and other aspects like:

• age
• gender
• interests
• their preferred media
• income
• ethnicity
• profession
• personality traits
• lifestyle

Once we are aware of the information above, we segment our audiences to how we would deliver them content, for eg., homemakers, college freshers, etc

After segmenting, we make buyer personas. Buyer Personas are a description of our audiences, a hypothetical person whose characteristics we study to address their goals, needs, pain points, wants, and buying patterns.

Visit this link to know more about how to make a buyer persona:

The most important thing we need to keep in mind is to be very particular about what content we provide to our audience. The content should be relevant to our products and services and should speak our brand values. It helps in building a community of people interested in our product/service and can be potential brand-loyal customers. Like Starbucks on Instagram, posts information about their products and services, new additions, their programs, and charities which speak not just what they are offering, but where are they offering from.

The last but prominent factor of all the information is knowing your competitor’s offerings. What topics do they talk about, or what are the trends they are following? Many tools can help us give the same information, and competitor analysis for content are:

• Buzzsumo
• SEMrush
• Feedly

Content Calendar: A must!

The second strategy for Content Marketing this year should be making a content calendar. Content Calendar is a schedule for posting your content. Mostly Content Calendar templates are of a month, but you can make yours weekly, according to your organizational needs.

Visit to learn more about how to make a content calendar.

While Planning for the content calendar can look like a lot, as it requires content ideas for the whole month. You do not need to fret as most of the people don’t always have fresh content ideas on the go. As for every person, there are seven blogs present on the web! So the kind of content you can post beside your product/service or brand are:

• Curated Content
• Repurposed Content
• Content Atomization
• UGC

Once you have a content calendar ready, after posting your content, the most important thing is to measure its reach. Lucky for us, we live in a world so advanced that everything has a metric that can track its relevancy. Those metrics are:

• Consumption Metrics
• Sharing Metrics
• Lead Generation Metrics
• Sales Metrics

These metrics will help us track what type of content is getting a good reach, what type of content leads to CTA, or what type of content didn’t generate any action.

Optimize everything in your sight!

The third Content Marketing Strategy for this year is optimization or making the most of our websites and social media. Optimization in today’s scenario yields more results than anything paid, as it gives us more organic results. SEO, as many of you, would have known is just not about using keywords and hashtags, but optimizing the site so well that it reaches the ranks through SERP (Search engine results page).

There are many new ways to optimize your content; they are:

• Targeted Landing Pages: These are those web pages entailed with information, especially targeting specific marketing messages. If your landing page is keyword-driven, has an optimized URL, and use meta tags, so that Google Bots can read them easily, your page is bound to rank much higher than other web pages. The trick here is to understand that even if quality content is what matters today, it is also imperative to strategize it in a way that Google interprets and delivers that to your audience. Taking these measures will help Google appreciate your website as well as provide quality content to your audience.
• Content should be adaptive: With most of our audience hooked to their phones, we need to create and publish content adaptive to their platforms. Someone who was viewing your website on a laptop should also be able to see it on phone later.
• Emotional Approach: Most of us think that it’s the facts that convince people of credibility and increase their reach. That is completely untrue as emotions drive people, and that is the only way to reach them. Try to use headlines that depict an emotional tone.
• What’s happening behind the curtain?: Big MNC’s like Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube, post their behind the scenes so that they can evoke a sense of curiosity in them by making the audience think this is their need. Now even if the information might not be relevant to a person, the idea that they still posted this generates curiosity in people’s minds as to why someone would post it, and they watch it to find out.
• Ok, Google? Alexa? Siri? Cortana?: Hearing this a lot nowadays? With voice search so much in use, we should make sure to optimize our content in context to this.

With these three strategies, you will be able to make your content marketing effective this year. Okay Google, here is the end of the article.

So, if you are a business owner, you need to ponder over what makes this content search or research so important. Commonly, you need to think about one thing. What is the preferred method people choose while searching for content?

Do you type any phrase into the search bar of Google? Are you asking Siri or Alexa? Well, like most of the 60% of individuals who are using the Internet all over the world, it will be a combination of all. Surprisingly, you might be searching for content using voice search but your own brand’s content won’t be synchronized with the possibility of having a voice search. This might be a huge issue when you are trying to reach connected consumers.

Getting Assistance from Content Marketing

The significance of content marketing is just as important as earning and keeping customers in 2019 and the year before. Perhaps in the coming years, its importance will double fold. However, it is becoming a bit expensive too.

Now as the content is continuing to proliferate and organic search traffic is continuing to increase as well as trends in the technology are putting huge brands at the risk of being less advanced, there is an extensive increase in competition. This is something that brands can’t miss out.

3 Successful Strategies to Improvise Content Marketing

The following are the three major strategies brands should use for increasing relevance, reach, retention, resonance and get more value from content marketing in 2020

1) Going for Voice Search

Voice search which means speaking directly to your smart device rather than typing in the search bar is becoming more common. No doubt it is one of the biggest percentages of Google searches and it is becoming extensively popular.

As per the studies conducted by Google in 2016, it displayed that more than 20% of all cellphone searches were voice mode and somewhere by 2020, it is predicted that more than 60% of all searches will be voice-activated.

So, how does content marketing strategies relate to voice search? Well, there a few things you need to understand. The first thing is that voice search is depended on natural language. So, your focus must be on long-tail phrases, keywords or full sentences.

Secondly, you need to optimize your search engine optimization for local searches. Why? Well, the voice search is somewhat three times more likely to help in local nature. And lastly, you must focus on providing answers to conversational queries that customers will like to answer. This is by creating FAQ pages and even highly targeted content.

2) Adding Transparency in All Aspects of Content Marketing Strategy Process

One thing you need to know about connected consumers is that they value authenticity and transparency very highly in comparison to the previous generations. With regard to the content creation strategy, people want to view your brand as transparent, authentic, and living up to its value. All these need to be fulfilled just before hitting the ‘purchase’ button. So, content marketing is one of the best ways to convey this.

The following are some of the major tips you can follow-

• Create and write blog posts which can bring out the importance of your corporate social responsibility. Plus, you need to think about the various ethical standards that you might have to use for choosing vendors. Also, check out if there are communities that are simply committed to them.
• Take part in relevant and important trending conversations present in social media which easily matches your value. You have to make sure that your brand has certain things that is meaningful in contribution. However, if you are having issues in anything besides marketing pitch, then you better stay out of the conversation.

3) Implementing Better and More Personalization As Well As Interactions

Do you know that connected consumers always like certain kind of personalization? This was unheard for about two or four years back. So, it means that if you are using AI and machine learning capabilities in content marketing, then it will be powerful and great.

AI can digest a huge amount of data. Also, it provides a good amount of insights into what customer’s need, where they are spending their time online, etc. Now tapping to the power of AI for content marketing strategies is still not a clear option for you, don’t worry.

You can still develop highly targeted content. These will be answers to all the detailed queries. Just for example, if various customers want to buy items from a specific price range, all you need to do is provide them with the product that matches their price range.

Some of the basic steps you can follow are –

• Become highly specific and that too with categories and tagging on your blog.
• Develop marketing emails which request for reviews. These will be sent to customers once they make any engagement or purchase.
• Try to engage with customers using live video platforms as well as answering queries as and when they come.

Future of Content Marketing in 2020

The content marketing strategy process is not going anywhere. You might be surprised to know that it will take on a new life where the era is all about connected consumers. The time has come for you to think and increase the investments you make in the content creation strategy of your brand so that you can provide your customers with what they want. Otherwise, they might go for other brands.