The phases of content development are all important to your online marketing efforts. Great content creation can help you grab a firm position as a valuable leader in your industry. You market your products and services using valuable information to gain the trust and confidence of your audience. In order to capture valuable leads, your content must conform to the needs of your target market.
Content Development and the Buying Cycle
When using content to attract customers, the phases of content development help you lead your potential clients through the buying cycle by:
- Building understanding of your company by generation of qualified leads
- Demonstrating that you completely and clearly understand the needs of current and future clients
- Helping your clients and future clients to evaluate your company and make a decision
- Supporting the purchase choice and implementation by your current and future clients
- Fostering client loyalty and driving repeat customers
You need to position your small business as a thought driven leader using various types of content, including but not limited to:
- case studies
- blog posts
- e-newsletters
- ebooks
- social media posts
- infographics
- press releases
- podcasts
- images
- videos
Using multiple types of content will allow you to earn trust and credibility among your audience. It also gives your brand online recognition. Although this increases as you gain a better understanding of the needs of your target audience, you’ll always need all five phases of content development.
The Five Phases of Content Development
An effective content development strategy will consist of five phases, which are:
- Exploring – discovering your goals, your target audience and developing a content marketing strategy
- Planning – deciding on the who, what, when, where, how and why of your content marketing strategy
- Creating – figuring out what your content needs are and writing, editing, designing and producing great content
- Delivering – ensuring that your intended messaged is delivered effectively to the correct audience as it pertains to your products and services
- Measuring – analyzing the results of all of your offline and online advertising and marketing campaign to determine whether or not your content marketing goals have been met
Accomplishing Content Development Goals
Some of the popular goals for small businesses when it comes to content marketing are to:
- Generate valuable leads
- Nurture leads until they’re ready to buy
- Engage with current customers
- Upsell or cross-sell products and services
Content Marketing is the most effective tool that you can use to engage your audience. Valuable, reliable, informative content will help you gain the trust and confidence of your target market, while building your brand online. But, you’ll need to ensure that you don’t skip any of the valuable phases of content development.
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