Successful start to Content Marketing

Understand content marketing as a field of practice that plans, creates, and delivers content to meet marketing goals, while recognizing its growth as an industry and career path.

Explore the long history of content marketing, from Ben Franklin's almanac to modern digital media, revealing how brands build trust, awareness, and audience across B2B and B2C.

Define a clear content marketing goal to guide strategy; attract new customers with targeted content and engage existing customers to deepen loyalty and drive referrals.

Explore advanced, profitable goals of content marketing, including maximizing advertising royalties, sponsorships, licensing, and productization, with real-world examples from Kraft Foods, Mayo Clinic, Red Bull, and Lego.

Identify your niche audience by prioritizing your company's key customer types and creating content that helps them solve problems and achieve goals.

Identify and target your niche audience to unlock effective content marketing. Focus on your priority customers, tailor content to help them, and leverage context to influence the right people.

Explore content experience across three phases: finding, consuming, and discovering more, to make discovery easy, reading or viewing smooth, and engagement meaningful for content marketing.

Promote your content marketing through email and social media, grow a loyal audience with list-building, updates, and targeted ads, and plan regular promotions to sustain engagement.

Only 36% of content marketers document a strategy. Define your winning aspiration, decide where to play, and map how to win using competitive analysis and audience insights.

Identify the right audience for content marketing by avoiding two common mistakes—being too broad or too narrow—and use market research to estimate audience size and potential impact for acquiring customers.

Conduct a basic competitive analysis to understand content marketing rivals, review topics, formats, and quality, and use web performance tools to uncover strengths and gaps.

Identify your unique right to win in content marketing by applying the three angles: subject matter expertise, data, and your content approach to outperform rivals.

Map the customer journey to generate content ideas for awareness, research, shopping, and service phases. Use a whiteboard and post-its to align existing content with new ideas and uncover opportunities.

Choose channels your audience already uses and formats you can produce regularly, verify audience alignment with data, and update tactics as trends evolve.

Identify sustainable content sources by producing in-house, partnering with credible collaborators, or paying external producers; such approaches—like Fidelity Investments, 23andMe with iHeartRadio, and Meadowcroft—enable scalable, long-term content marketing.

Develop content with user friendliness, relevance, and influence by ensuring it serves a clear customer purpose, adds nuance for specialized audiences, and drives perceptions or behaviors.

Develop reliable content operations by creating a clear content calendar that tracks topics, owners, formats, data, and channels, maps content to the customer journey, and guides consistent delivery.

Define your content marketing as a four-phase process—planning, producing, delivering, and maintenance—guided by a strategy, cadence, and collaboration to keep content fresh and SEO-friendly.

Define clear roles and responsibilities to prevent silo syndrome and keep your content marketing on track, including a content marketing manager, writer/editor, format specialists, and production specialists.

Scale your content operations by using data to optimize planning and production, leverage fact sheets, automate tasks with How Sweet and Gathers Content, and add a content analyst.

Identify three key content marketing KPIs: whether the right audience finds your content, how your audience perceives your brand after interaction, and the impact on subscriptions or purchases.

Explore how to collect and sample data for content marketing key performance indicators by leveraging web analytics, channel analytics, and voice of the customer to understand audience behavior and perceptions.

Optimize content performance by making it easier to find, using link building, and running experiments to boost engagement and reach.

Identify three paths to content technology. Supplement existing tools with planning and review accelerators, or use marketing platforms like HubSpot or Pardot, or content marketing platforms like Contently or Skyword.

Explore how advanced personalization helps audiences find relevant content as your site grows. See how natural language generation automates content creation and governance ensures brand and accessibility compliance.

Develop a strategy for your content technology stack by partnering with marketing and IT, building a roadmap, and training users to ensure adoption.

Scale your content marketing by adding new formats or channels, expanding topics with audience feedback, and repackaging content into new contexts to boost reach and repeat purchases.

Leverage the three c's—purpose-driven voice, speed, and surprising sophistication—to win content marketing for small businesses. Access agile insights, cost-effective tech, and founder-inspired content that outpaces large competitors.

For enterprise content marketing, master the three e's—x per day, expertise, and empowered execution—by partnering wisely, leveraging in-house know-how, and training teams to beat bureaucracy.

Learn to build authority and grow your brand by creating live educational videos that answer the most asked questions, presenting two main points per question, and showcasing your expertise.

Leverage live interview videos to collaborate with professionals, feature complementary partners to add value to your audience, and prep guests with three questions and a clear call to action.

Live demo videos connect with the audience by showing how to use products, letting viewers follow along or rewatch. Examples include meal kits, makeup tutorials, and workouts.

Lead with a prepared live video tour that highlights behind-the-scenes moments to humanize your brand, focusing on natural lighting, clear sound, and a stable, well-planned sequence.