What is Content Marketing? Strategy Guide | ICX Consulting

Everyday sales management is advancing and changing strategies, the way of addressing the public, the way of thinking, and the consumer's buying behavior; these changes have helped the emergence and growth of professionals who specialize in understanding it and dedicate their efforts to implement strategies and methodologies according to the needs of each buyer.

Introducing ourselves to the topic of marketing strategies, first of all, what is a marketing strategy?

It is the process that allows a company to focus on the available resources and use them in the best possible way to make itself known in the market, increase its sales and gain a competitive advantage over its competitors.

Strategies are based on the company's business objectives. To be able to apply these objectives to the development of a plan, they must be specified and defined, which is why the phrase "Smart objectives" is used:

• Specific: an objective must refer to a concrete and tangible achievement, for example, "to increase lead generation by 25% according to the selected digital channels during the next year".
• Measurable: it must be clear which measurement tools will be used to know whether the objective has been achieved or not.
• Achievable: it is essential that the objectives present a realistic challenge, otherwise resources, efforts and time will only be wasted.
• Relevant: the objectives must be related to the overall goals of the company and show a clear correlation. For example, if we want to achieve an impact on sales, the metric to follow should be the number of conversions and not the interactions on Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks.
• Time-bound: the timeline of the marketing strategy has to be clearly defined from the beginning, what and how to achieve it.

Considering these data, it is important to define which is the best strategy to execute to achieve the objectives, there are many to mention such as:

• Content Marketing
• Account-based marketing
• Inbound Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Retargeting
• Among others

In this blog we will talk about Content Marketing, which is based on creating value for users through relevant content in different formats:

• Blog articles: however they continue to be very effective, their success requires dedication and effort to publish regularly.
• Infographics: Data represented visually (images, graphs, and others) attracts and helps to better understand the information presented.
• Videos: They are a trend in the new generations, and it is very easy to understand the information with video tutorials; it is a new way to connect with the audience.
• You can also include e-books, seminars, among others.

This content serves as a starting point to raise brand awareness and capture leads, which can be seen as:

• A way to generate free value, with content that is important to the user you are targeting.
• It can also be seen as a long-term investment as the content stays on the website for a long time helping and informing other users.
• It is a way to bring the whole team together, everyone brings different points of view that help refreshes the image and information offered to the user.

• It is not direct advertising: Although it may be very similar, advertising as such is based on paying for advertising and space in other media to an existing audience. Content Marketing is organic advertising where the database is built little by little.
• It is not just about writing blogs or generating content for users to read or see about the brand, it is about having a complete content strategy behind it, which normally consists of four stages:
  
  • Traffic generation.
  • Lead generation.
  • Lead nurturing.
  • Customer generation (Conversion)
    
    

Read also: 7 tactics that will boost your account-based marketing process

Benefits of Content Marketing

If you start generating relevant content for your audience, you can get many benefits, including:

• Generate and gain the trust of users: If the content you share is really important and generates value for the audience, they will continue reading, downloading, and even sharing the information.
• Positioning: If you publish content regularly, with updated information, so that every time the user searches he can find articles related to your brand, you will become a reference in your industry/market.
• Increases SEO: It is a good technique to get positioning in Google, since you can get to appear in the first places of search, with a regular amount of traffic, and in addition, for free.
• Win customers and sales: All of the above can lead to generating more customers and therefore, more sales. As soon as this point is reached, it is important not to leave aside the sales process, the customer has to follow his journey through the sales funnel so that his experience is as satisfactory and friendly as possible.

To conclude this blog, I want to share a success story that can also help you learn from marketing strategies as well as this blog.

Success Case

A successful case that can be mentioned is the Hubspot blog, which specializes in publications with guides and steps in the areas of marketing, sales, and service.

This CRM platform helps the user with constant publications and valuable information about methodologies, steps, guides, etc., it even has a Hubspot Academy module so that users who already use the platform can learn about new methodologies, concepts that allow you to improve in the use of the same tool and increase the efficiency and productivity of the teams.