¿What is content marketing and content strategies in USA?

Types of contents

There are contents that a company can create but cannot be confused with content marketing:

• Brand content: Videos, events, games, mixing entertainment and brand advertising.
• Corporate content: Product catalogs, press releases, web page messages.
• Advertising content: Banners or campaigns, promotions on Facebook, spots on YouTube, etc.

If we focus on the type of content within content marketing can be classified from different perspectives.

• The textual contents: Articles, case studies, interviews, etc.
• Audiovisual contents: Videos, infographics, illustrations, photographs, etc. These can come to explain data of reports, to show a guide step by step in a more understandable way.
• The microcopy: Its function is to put context, also prevents misinterpretations, for example link in a tweet and encouraging the reader to click

Another way to classify the contents that will help us choose the most convenient, taking into account who creates it, based on the criteria of the subject that uses:

• Content generated by the user: In this case it can be induced by the company as contests, promotions, some photo or video, perhaps a post with recommendations. It must be borne in mind that these contents the costs are zero but the reputation can be positively influenced because it is a real recommendation of a user to its contact network.
• Own content: We have the contents created by the workers or external personnel and it is distributed in our own channels. Corporate and advertising content is its own content, although in content marketing not everything must be focused on the company’s products.
• Third party content: When we recommend content from other users or companies in our corporate channels, we are doing content curation. In the curing of contents can be very useful in saving resources, mainly time, although it takes a little time if you want to find valuable content but you save in the creation, that if you have to take into account that they are content dedicated to our sector.

Content curation consists of searching and selecting third-party content to publish your link in our channels in recommendation mode, always attributing the sources and never pass for your own, in order not to generate duplicate contents.

Taking into account these concepts, we can say that other content strategies may be combining own content with curated content since it depends on the ability to generate and find them.

Value content

In content marketing the most important is to generate value to the user, no more content is needed but quality of content, the important thing is not only to generate the content, it is to reach the user fulfilling their need at the moment.

In order to obtain a content of value we must take into account variables that are:

• Relevant: Standing out above the rest of contents, either because of its differential focus or its subject matter.
• Useful: That satisfies your curiosity in a practical way.
• Shareable: Reputation won to give that content in your network of contacts.
• Credible: Demonstrate what we know in the topics to be published.
• Quality: In the contents associate our brand or logo without embarrassing us.
• Original: Transmit transparency and personality in the writing.
• Good: Expect from our users a level of satisfaction of good work.
• Customized: Designed for our user and only for him.
• With a purpose: To fulfill an objective within the strategy of the company but also to satisfy the objective of the user in consuming it.

In order to comply with this value in content, we need to create content strategies, by which we can assume the requirements of users like ours. For this reason to create content with these characteristics mentioned above we could say that the content is king, we must be clear that not all content is used for content marketing.

In content marketing, several objectives are met, such as:

Content to attract traffic

The contents begin to work well at the moment that they achieve a specific objective. Next we will name some visual contents to attract traffic:

• Infographics explain processes or show data in a more digestible way.
• Photographs of product use.
• Videos that explain some use of the product or concept closely.

Humor videos or funny images have great viral potential, this kind of viral content are the ones that have the most visibility for the brand and traffic.

There are content that can generate a lot of traffic and are available to all companies are those who share knowledge such as:

• Articles of a blog based on processes and interpretations of the sector.
• Product reviews or current news.
• Ebooks, guides, tutorials and pdf documents downloaded from the company’s website.
• Templates in different formats.
• Studies, statistics and interpreted data, whether obtained from own surveys or from another reference company.

Companies must know the audience to discover each new detail and thus be able to improve our content. The important thing is to analyze the conversations that they publish on the Internet, to know every detail of how they express themselves, as is their usual terminology and what language they use professionally.

With these data we will be starting to create our Style Guide, this will be based on our way of speaking as well as on our audience.

Content and then the channel.

You have to take into account first create the content and then think about the channel, to know our audience we will know where we are going to direct our content and spend our time in those channels that generate more communication.

It is much more profitable in the long term to think first of what messages to communicate and then in the channels that will be needed to let us know. In this way you can establish editorial lines for each channel or search for the maximum diffusion of a single message in all those that we use.

It is very important to keep in mind that the more detailed the editorial line is, the more it will define us and not the competition.

To conceptualize the editorial line you can start with:

• The slogan or tagline is a good beginning.
• What the competition does is a good guide if you do not know where to start.
• The values that they want to communicate seen from the user.
• The desired keywords for search engine positioning.
• The orientation that we want to give to the contents.

Anyway, you have to know how to choose the most important channels to optimize them and get the most benefit without having to increase resources. In many cases it does not make sense to open accounts in all social networks, since they can escape an organized plan. By identifying the channels we can decide the contents to be used as:

• Articles
• Images
• Videos
• Records
• Curated content

Each channel can have its editorial line and serve for different purposes, we have the case of the blog can be a channel of own content, Facebook can serve to promote the content of the blog and curation of content and twitter as customer service, are an example of a strategy since everyone depends on who organizes it.

Timings of content marketing.

Time is a key factor in content marketing, taking into account that the results are medium or long term to the point of meeting the objectives.

To publish the content you must use tools such as an editorial calendar or publication, you can also design a table in xls updating it every month to a calendar in the cloud as Divvy HQ or perhaps Google calendar and / or Outlook calendar, the important thing is to keep it updated .

To be more clear that you must have in the document, you have to identify that it is published, if it is a post or a newsletter, also where it is published if in the blog, social networks, taking into account when it is published, who publishes it and because it is published.

To finish you have to measure the results of the contents in the different channels, measuring is a way to reaffirm the strategy and know what to correct, we can establish different types of metrics according to the objective of the strategy such as: