Getting started with content marketing: a step-by-step guide

Some people think content marketing — is some kind of magic. It is not. Content marketing is a structured, repeatable process with its own goals and tools. I see five methods or stages:

1. Audience research
2. Collect audience questions and choose formats
3. Distribution
4. Measure the results
5. Repeat the cycle

Most often, the main goal content marketing is to generate sales, webinar registrations or service enquiries. Let's look at the purpose of each stage.

First, understand who your customers are. Start by reviewing your channels: social media, website or blog. Then ask people who speak to customers directly, such as your call centre, sales team or retail staff.

Here are a few questions to help:
— Who are our customers?
— What problems or tasks do they have?
— How can we help them solve these?

Then research your competitors. Keep asking questions from their customers' perspective: What are they doing? Why? What works, and what does not?

Even basic answers, without in-depth research, can give you a foundation for future content. Example: competitor analysis for Vo!Moloko, a fresh-food delivery service in Google Sheets

Articles, videos and podcasts are all content formats, each with different time, budget and production requirements. We recommend starting with simple formats: articles, social media posts and visual cards in the style of Meduza, a Russian news outlet.

To choose formats more easily, list your audience's questions and group them by the kind of answer needed: practical, social or emotional. For example, a content table for a Montessori kindergarten and school.

When we created this model, we took inspiration from editor Maxim Ilyakhov's approach; before that, we used topic categories. Unlike broad categories, this model starts from prospective customers' needs rather than the content format itself.

The key is to collect as many ideas as possible, even ones that seem wild at first. When you start creating content, you will see which ones are useful.

Comments under posts are a source of ideas.

To keep a steady flow of customer questions and problems, organise ways to collect them. Here are a few options:

— Collect questions and problems from your CRM system.. A CRM is often connected to all your channels: the website chat, email and social media messaging. Review conversations daily and add interesting situations to a shared document.

— Start a recurring feature on your website or social media where people can ask your specialists questions. To get the conversation started, publish a few questions and answers yourself. One option for your website is a Google Form.

— Follow the resources your audience reads. Your audience is almost always reading and learning about related topics elsewhere. Follow those sources to discover questions and discuss them from your perspective.

Every piece of content needs promotion.

Imagine a customer receiving hundreds of messages each day—from family and friends, Telegram channels, work email and a Facebook feed. It is difficult to break through that information overload.

That is why your content needs promotion: so more followers and new viewers see it in social media feeds, search results and their inboxes.

If your business can share case studies, we recommend starting by promoting them. A case study lets you show your value in detail: who the client was, the problem, how you solved it together and what implementation involved. Readers can see your work in action.

Completing the stages once is a win, but you will need to repeat them to identify weak points: Did we define the target audience correctly? Understand its problems? Choose the right format and channels? Select the right audience for advertising? Does our content support business goals such as reach, consultations and sales?

There are hundreds of questions to revisit in a continuous cycle, one stage at a time.

Questions about content marketing? Send them to mail@serenity.marketing

We will answer them in future posts and articles.