How to Crush Competition with Killer Content Marketing

And How to Write a Blog Like This One

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Philip Mandelbaum
04/22/2022

a slender hand reaches from a gray sweatshirt sleeve to touch a book on a library shelve, symbolizing how far we've come in creating custom content

There’s only one way to write web content. The right way. And while you could just free-associate all over your blog, you could also develop a content marketing strategy that not only aligns with your core competencies but provides the backbone for everything you do to promote your brand. With the web content you create, you inform, engage, inspire and empower your prospects and customers. On your website and with your emails and social media posts, you leverage that digital content — and the content generated by your customers and influencers — to deliver messaging and experiences that are targeted to your audience(s). It is this content that brings new users to your site, converts those users to leads, and then nurtures those leads into customers and, finally, brand ambassadors.

So, what is content marketing? And what is the right way to do it?

What is Content Marketing?

We’re all sick of traditional ads. We’ve been inundated for years on TV, on the radio, on billboards, in newspapers and magazines and, more recently, on websites, google searches and social media. Consumers spoke up en masse, without even knowing it. Simply, they stopped clicking — and, when they did click, they opted out before signing up or completing an order. Consumers got smarter, which left a gaping hole for advertisers and marketers, online and off.

Nevertheless, the more level headed, sophisticated and strategic professionals didn’t dig in their heels; they coalesced on couches with big white boards and tossed out ideas. Then they started testing, and what they discovered is that — while misleading advertorials, rightfully, deter potential customers — clearly marked, value-add digital content that consumers want builds trust and loyalty. And, with that, the paradigm shifted.

According to Marketing Insider Group:

The number one reason that content marketing is important is that your customers appreciate it. Content marketing generates 3 times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and has the potential for a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic. The reality is, content marketing has fostered the customer-centric reality we’re now operating in. From well-researched white papers to podcast series listeners can’t live without, content is changing the relationship between the brand and consumer.

man with long shaggy hair, mostly out focus, looks up, smiling, at a pink hologram, representing an example of digital content

So What Is Digital Content?

Digital content is the product of content marketing, referring to any type of content that you (and your influencers and customers) create to tell your brand story. What differentiates content marketing from traditional marketing and advertising is that the digital content you create tells your brand story indirectly. Instead of touting the benefits of your product or service, you focus on your user personas and their pain points, needs, goals and core values — and demonstrate (typically, subtly) how your product or service can provide the solutions they seek. By appealing to consumers’ emotions, and demonstrating empathy, transparency, consistency and authenticity across all your digital content, you can develop customer relationships that provide value for years.

OK, Then What is Content Marketing Strategy?

Don’t expect to appeal to potential or existing customers with ad hoc blog posts, or without a plan for your content creation. This plan is your content marketing strategy, consisting of what content you’ll create (your content creation process), for whom you’ll be creating it, the cadence at which it will be posted, and where and how it will be shared.

But Why is Content Marketing Important?

Content marketing is critical to any digital marketing strategy; without web content, you have no assets for your SEO strategy, social media marketing, email and SMS marketing or digital advertising. Plus, 86% of people skip video ads, 44% ignore direct mail, and 91% unsubscribe from company emails. But if that’s not enough to convince you, here are some stats that can’t be ignored:

Content marketing produces 300% more leads than traditional marketing
Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing
90% of consumers find custom content useful
60% of consumers seek out a product after reading about it

a hand holds a Fire TV Stick, pointed at a blurred flatscreen television, symbolizing the types of traditional advertising that sophisticated, modern consumers skip, facilitating the growth of the content marketing field

Developing Your Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you’re like the other 97% of marketers who consider content marketing integral to their overall marketing strategy, it’s time to identify what makes a content marketing strategy work. If you follow these tips, steps and best practices, you can expect to outperform the 43% of marketers who don’t yet have a content marketing strategy at all.

Six Quick Tips from a Content Marketing Expert

I interviewed Associated Press creative content manager Adam Clement — who helped me create AP Content Services — and asked him for his advice. Here are Adam’s top six content marketing tips:

Inform, entertain, and be timely. Advertisers benefit when messaging informs, entertains and/or engages readers on topics that are timely and relevant, while providing insights not strictly beholden to the advertiser’s product or service.
Speak with, don’t sell to. To earn trust and bypass the cynicism one has when confronted with any advertisement, messaging should aspire to treat the reader as an individual to be spoken with — and not sold to. Look at some of the most successful brands online today, and it’s easy to see the strength of storytelling when the messaging is less concerned with hard-selling a product or service. Look instead to provide information (or entertainment) as a resource to audiences while positioning your brand as a thought leader or tastemaker in your respective space.
Craft a story, not a sales pitch. Allow journalistic principles to guide your content marketing: Tell the truth, don’t purposefully deceive and tell a story rather than focusing solely on selling a product or service. Refer to research and reporting where it makes sense to. No story was ever made weaker with facts and expert sources. Let those elements elevate your content and help win over reluctant customers with a soft-sell approach.
Think small to win bigger. Advertisers can make the mistake of overwriting on topics that are very high-level. While there’s a time and place to paint in broader strokes, a more effective method is to zero-in on the best of your brand and its values, and pull on those threads to spin up a more focused and engaging narrative. For example: A story about the products a bank may offer is less engaging than a story about how a student athlete made it to the NFL thanks to that bank’s community philanthropy, scholarship program or corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies.
Stand for something. The content economy has never been more crowded, and when it comes to standing out from the noise, many Advertisers are relying on thought leadership to be heard. This can be achieved by carving out a niche or owning the conversation around a salient topic in the news cycle. Ask yourself: What makes your brand different? What does the brand stand for? What are its ethics? What are its values? Are those reflected in the messaging you choose to put out?
Anticipate opposition. This is the internet, after all. Craft messaging that considers multiple angles and sides of a given spectrum and craft your messaging with skepticism in mind. Put another way: Prepare to make apathetic or resistant audiences care about your messaging. You only have so little time and space to make your content count.

A neon sign reading 'WHAT IS YOUR STORY?' in the middle of a glass window, with an office seen through the glass

Six Steps to Creating a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

Companies with blogs produce 67% more leads per month. But blogging is one of many tactics you should incorporate into a content marketing strategy. To create your content marketing strategy, you have to think beyond the blog.

1. Develop Your Brand Story

If you haven’t created a brand story already, you’re late. Figure out what your story is, and how to tell it. Start by asking:

Why and how were we created?
What are our core values?
What is our value proposition?
What value do we provide consumers beyond our product/service offerings?
What makes us special or unique?
What is our brand personality and voice?

2. Define Your Audience(s)

You could employ the world’s leading content marketing strategist and digital content creator and still fall flat if you don’t identify — and disseminate content to — the right audience(s). Here’s how to find yours:

Use your zero-, first- and third-party data to learn as much as you can about your existing customers, subscribers, website users and social media followers
Use an SEO tool to identify your key competitors, and who/what they’re targeting
Use any feedback your CX and sales teams have logged to identify gaps and opportunities
Use surveys and focus groups to learn more about what customers, prospects and the general public think of your brand, products/services and messaging
Develop user personas, including the following for each:

Personal background
Professional background
User environment
Preferred content types
Attitudes, interests, motivations, needs, goals and pain points
Buying motivation(s), or what the user hopes to accomplish by purchasing
Buying scenarios, or the context in which a user is likely to purchase

Use the empathy map, a concept developed by liminal thinking, culture mapping and gamestorming expert Dave Gray, to enhance your user personas; ask client-facing and senior-level internal stakeholders:

What would the user be thinking and/or feeling? What are their pain points? What are their needs and goals? What are their values?
What would the user’s friends and colleagues say while the user is using our product? What would the user hear?
What would the user see while using our product in their environment?
What would the user say or do while using our product? How would that change in a public or private setting?
What are some of the user’s fears when using our product?
What gains might the user experience when using our product?

Map out the customer journey

What are all the different paths a consumer might take toward making a purchase?
What are your prospects and customers’ thoughts, feelings and actions at each stage of the customer lifecycle?
How are you retaining existing customers and developing ongoing loyalty to extend the customer lifecycle?

Use a CDP to organize and manage all your customers and prospects, segment audiences based on your user personas, and personalize your content marketing

3. Establish Your Content Marketing Goals

To ensure clear direction for your content marketing strategy:

Define goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-based (SMART)
Start with your overall business goals, proceed to your long-term strategic marketing goals, and conclude with your content marketing and campaign-specific goals
Identify the digital marketing KPIs against which you’ll measure your content’s performance
Outline your expectations for each stage of the customer lifecycle

an aerial view of an evergreen forest, symbolizing the need for evergreen content

4. Audit Your Existing Content

Once you’ve clarified who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your content marketing, look back at what you’ve already created to determine whether it meets those deep, forensic, technical SEO requirements. Then, ask yourself:

Is our content up to date?
Is our content optimized for search?
Is our content evergreen?
Does our content meet the requirements for the intended stage of the customer lifecycle or sales funnel?
Does our content have a clear target audience?
Does our content include an appropriate CTA?

To track your audit, create a spreadsheet with the following columns:

Title of page/post
Meta description
Keyword
URL
Target user persona
Funnel/Lifecycle stage
CTA
Gated/Ungated
Date references
KPI: Unique views
KPI: Average time on page
KPI: Bounce rate
KPI: Click-through rate
Keep/Kill/Refresh
Notes and suggestions

Then:

Consider developing new campaigns with any content that already meets all the requirements (Keep)
Remove any content that is outdated, contains inaccurate information and/or has performed poorly (Kill)
Update any content that, if optimized, might perform as well as the content you’ve elected to keep (Refresh)

5. Outline Your Content Development Process and Distribution Channels

Before you begin planning and then creating custom content, you need to secure buy-in from all parties on how your content will be produced and disseminated. Specifically:

Who are our content strategists?
Who are our content creators?
Who are our content reviewers?
Who are our content marketers?
Who are our content marketing analysts?
How are the content themes and subjects determined?
What types of content (e.g., blog posts, white papers, landing pages, or videos) are being created? And what unique step(s) does each type require?
At what cadence is the content released?
How are the content deadlines determined?
Where, when and how is the content promoted?
What type of project management style (e.g., agile) are we adopting?
What project management software are we using (e.g., JIRA, for agile)?

A black and white vertical content calendar hangs on a white wall

6. Develop Your Editorial Plan and Content Calendar

Finally, you can flesh out your content marketing ideas. Start by outlining your core competencies, or the subject areas about which you have the most expertise — these will form your content hubs, for which you’ll create what’s called pillar content. Your content hubs can be created as sections of your website, or as long-form (blog) reads, with the pillar content providing a high-level overview of the subject, while linking out to more granular, funnel stage-specific content.

Interview internal stakeholders on topics their past work suggests would appeal to your audience(s)
Look back at your content audit and identify the topics with the best performance
Ask your high-value clients and influencers what inspired them to visit your site, request a demo, make a purchase or promote your brand
Spy on your competitors — what concepts or content types do you see that you haven’t touched on or tried?

Then, sign back into SEMrush or ahrefs, and confirm your current SERP rankings and your target keywords, including:

Short-tail
Long-tail
Short-term
Long-term
Product-defining
Customer-defining
Intent-targeting keywords

For each of your target keywords, add a list of “easier” (lower keyword competition score), related keywords. Next, use your SEO platform’s content/topic research tool for additional ideas. And lastly, build out a spreadsheet organized by topic, with columns for:

User persona
Funnel/Lifecycle stage
Content type
Primary keyword
Secondary keyword
Title
Headers
CTA
Gated/Ungated

With all this organized, you can identify gaps and opportunities related to your user personas, funnel or lifecycle stages, content types and keywords — with the goal of covering them all, as well as interconnecting related pieces of content to direct users down the funnel/lifecycle and toward your desired actions.

Once you’ve finalized your content plan, you can create your editorial calendar. Use the project management software you selected earlier to build out a master calendar, as well as the timeline for each campaign, project and assignment, assigning all roles from development to approval and from distribution to monitoring, analysis, iteration and optimization.

Digital Content Creation and Blogging: Best Practices

It’s not enough for your customers and prospects, or Google, to simply develop your website and content hubs according to content marketing and SEO best practices; each and every piece of web content you create needs to be optimally structured as well. Take this article as an example. Here’s what I’ve included:

Title, in 56 characters or less, with primary keyword (in this case, “content marketing”), and a popular phrase (e.g., “How to,” “Why,” “The Top…”) — the how-to article is the most popular content format
Meta description, in 156 characters or less, with primary keyword, teasing the content
Keyword in first paragraph
Headlines (H1, H2s, H3s, and H4s) with keywords, and lists — list headlines generate more pageviews than any other
Keywords throughout the content
Frequent lists within the content — posts containing frequent lists generate 70% more traffic
Images, related to the content themes, with alt text, including keywords if possible — posts that include images generate two to four times more traffic, 30% more shares, and 25% more backlinks
Internal links to related content
Outbound links to other high-authority, non-competing sites
Call to action (CTA)
Short URL, with keyword
Long read — long-form contents generates 200% more pageviews
Article, FAQ and Speakable structured data from schema.org

Next Steps

Remember: the work of a content marketer is never over. In between content development, your team should be glued to Google Analytics, tracking what works and what doesn’t and then iterating and optimizing what you have.

Want to learn more about the metrics against which you should be tracking performance? Get Your Guide to the 11 Most Important Digital Marketing KPIs.

Need to know more about the types of content to create for each stage of the customer lifecycle? Read this.

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