6 Steps To Develop Your Marketing Content

As mentioned in the previous article, marketing content is the key when it comes to achieving business goals. Content is the key to grab new followers when you target brand awareness, convince them of the product in the conversion stage, encourage them to take any action to purchase the product in the selling stage, and retain them as customers afterwards!

In this article, we will give you 6 steps to create outstanding content.

1. Plan

Planning is the first thing to do before starting to do your work. Your plan should be based on several elements that must be in place to help you define the core marketing message of your plan. Info such as: Situation Analysis, Competitors Analysis, Market Profile, and Customer Segments are crucial to complete your mission.

In this step, there are many marketing planning templates to use. SOSTAC is a good one. It entails of: Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control.

With a well-prepared foresighted plan, you will find the next steps are just pieces of cake!

1. Define

The previous step was related to the core marketing activities in general, but it is still the bedrock for the coming content creation process. With a good plan, you can define the marketing channels, the content types, tone of voice, emotional appeals, call to action...etc. Once equipped with this, you are able to start the creation process.

1. Create

When you start creating your content, put what is in your mind on paper. Then, learn about similar content; it may inspire you with additional ideas for content, visuals, and more!

The next step is to choose the content types to use, the most common content types are:

1. Informative content
2. Engaging content
3. Promotional content
4. Inspirational content
5. Entertaining content

Also, you can use content formats to create your piece of content, the most common frames are: 

1. Listicles.
2. How to guides.
3. Interviews.
4. Testimonials
5. Case Studies.
6. Tips & Tricks
7. Fun Facts
8. News
9. Votes
10. Trends - hijacking marketing- 

Finally, determine the visual way you want to introduce this content to your audience. Create the design brief. Finished? Take a BREAK!

4. Review

This is one of the most important steps but unfortunately, it is often forgotten! Read the content with an eagle eye and put yourself in the audience's shoes so you can evaluate your content. Review for any spelling mistakes, punctuation, tone of voice...etc.

5. Publish 

Publish the content on its main marketing channel, and don’t forget to customize the content if you want to publish it on other channels. Ex: The content on Facebook varies from Twitter content, Instagram content hero is the visual and this may differ on Facebook, etc.

You can think you’re done with the creation process at this point, but creating content to an audience without knowing their feedback is an incomplete process. This takes us to the last two steps, Listen & Analyze!

6. Listen & Analyze!

Listen is for “Social Media Listening”, this is one of the most important and exciting roles in social media marketing. It’s simply tracking what customers think & say about your business, and what your competitors do in your market.

You can use social media listening to know:

1. The customer feedback about your product, service, content,..etc.
2. What is the brand image the audience has in their minds regarding your business - this could be based on their thoughts, word of mouth, or real experience-!
3. The volume of audience engagement with your social media channels.
4. Best time to get in touch with your audience.
5. The content type they engage with the most.

And more!...

By acquiring and analyzing this data, comes the monitoring role by taking a corrective or  preventive action to constantly develop the content creation process.

In the coming article we will go deeper with the “Social Media Listening” concept, knowing the more benefits we can get, and what tools we can use! Till then, share with us if you have other techniques for content development, we’re waiting to hear from you!!