How to Pick Topics for Your Content Marketing Campaign

If you are among the content marketers who dutifully document your content strategy, then you are heading in the right direction. If not, maybe it's time to think about it and implement it for your campaign.

If you do this, it will benefit you because you get to monitor the contents you had created as well as who you created it for and the channels you used when you promoted those contents. But it's not enough that you know all these things. The information gives you a chance to assess and to keep track, but it will also help you in supporting your content marketing strategy.

With this information, you will be able to know why you chose that topic and what the results you got out of it were. In this post, we will show you some of the ways to choose the right topics for your content marketing strategy and how you can set up goals for each of them. Let us begin with how to set up goals for each of your content pieces.

1. Setting Goals for Your Content :

To make sure that your piece will be successful, you have to know the results that you want to achieve. You can list the goals for each of your content. You can then assess if you are creating the right kind of content and if it fits the timing.

In assigning goals for your contents, be it infographics, videos, or blog posts, you ought to look back to your goals in your organizational content marketing. You can see there how certain contents looks in the big picture.

For example, if your organizational goal is lead generation, then your content goals is to get trial signups and form submissions. This is usually best if performed in the later stages in the audience's buying journey. These people are those that are already aware of your brand and are already engaged. The possible types of content here are case studies, white papers, and ebooks.

If your organizational goal is brand awareness, then your content goal would generate referral traffic. The contents that are good for these goals are the ones that are aimed at getting backlinks. It will get a lot of referral traffic. Some of the content types that are great for this are infographics, skyscraper content pieces, guest posts, and roundup posts.

These are just examples of the types of organizational goals and content goals that you can come up with for your campaign. Try to devote some time for this. It will surely pay off in the long run in your content marketing strategy.

2. Taking Advantage of the Buying Cycle :

One key factor in creating the right kind of content is to know and understand the different buying stages that the customers are in. There are three stages in the buying journey. Let's start with the first one.

3. Awareness :

During this stage, the potential buyer acknowledges that they have a problem and they need to solve it. When the potential buyer searches for the solutions and discovers you, they will consider your service and enter the next phase which is the evaluation stage.

4. Evaluation :

In this stage, the customer wants to know more about what you can do for them so that their problems may be solved. They want to find out if you are among the best choices out there. If you can prove to them that you are, then they will enter into the last phase of the buying journey which is the purchase stage.

5. Purchase :

For this stage, the customer is now ready to buy your products or services. Now that you know how to understand your customer's buying journey, you will develop insights into the concerns and problems of your customers at the different phases of the buying journey.

If you can match your contents with the different phases of the buying journey, you can be sure that your contents are relevant to the customers. If you can do this, you can offer the right contents to the customers at the right time of their buying stages.

6. Choosing Relevant Topics :

The things we have discussed above won't do you any good if you don't choose the right topics for them. What you have to do is to consider your organizational goals and your content marketing goals.

Along with that, you should be able to have studied the phase of your customer's buying journey. This is how you can develop the types of contents that you will produce. By creating quality content, you will ensure your online reputation.

Maybe you can do it like this; you can create a white paper for your customers during their first stage. For their second stage, you can provide a case study. And for the third phase, you can offer them a free consultation. What you will do next would be to think about real topics that you have to cover.

The buying stages have already given you insights into the content types that you have to create. Now you have to come up with the topics to make. To know about what topics to write, you have to consider your customers. Here, a buyer persona will be very helpful. Creating a buyer persona will help you in identifying their needs as well as their goals.

The contents you make should always have the aim of helping them with those two.

7. Balancing the Types of Contents :

After identifying the different types of contents that can match the different buying stages of your customers as well as the buyer personas, you have to be aware if you've created far too many of them. Be careful if you are focusing in just one or two of the contents. You may lose track of the other things that you should be doing for your content marketing strategy.

Making the right content has to be paired with a well-rounded approach. This way, you will be able to hit all of your targets and you can be sure to get the results that you want. Make sure that you won’t leave anything out because every part of the campaign is important. So as much as content marketing is important, it is not the only one that you should focus on.

Don't focus on just one type of content; make sure to spice it up with a variety of them. Especially for B2B businesses, a good spread of content will be very helpful. This includes case studies, webinars, eBooks, white papers, and videos. By doing this, it will also help in getting more traffic.

Takeaway :

Now you know some of the strategies that will do well in your content marketing campaign. Try them out and don’t be afraid to experiment. If you feel like something else works for you, try to add them to the overall strategy and share them with us. The techniques will always depend on you and how you use them and at what time.

Only you will know the right mix of content and timing, basing on your experience on your content marketing campaign. All these techniques and strategies will start to make sense once you start using them. So start now and work on your campaign. Hopefully, the things we’ve discussed above can help you and improve the results that you get.

Author Bio:

Heidi Kim is a professional business consultant and legal researcher focusing on business laws. She is passionate in helping those who have any queries regarding business laws and how these may affect their respective businesses. Follow on Twitter @gehreslawatty

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