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content marketing

What is content marketing? (2021 Guide!)

Content marketing aims to increase the business’s reputation and sales by providing content to the audience. The content is not just an “article,” and in addition to the “site,” there are other channels to deliver content; However, both the format of the article and the site are essential in attracting the audience.

When a business enters the digital world, specifically digital marketing, to promote and introduce or sell its products, it pursues specific goals and fantasies that are right or wrong.

 One of these goals is to increase the company’s profit due to attracting customers from the Internet and increasing sales. The question, however, is how is this crucial achieved?

When Shahrzad I am not a storyteller.

I have seen enthusiastic people who attend various content marketing training classes and finally ask, “Well! “What should I write on my site now?” Most of these people eventually find a justification for themselves and become so-called “carefree” on the pretext that “writing” is a creative and inherent talent that they have not used!

Yes! These people are certainly not Shahrzad storytellers or literary writers, but their problem is not such a problem. Still, the work is done from a place where, firstly, they do not have a proper understanding of “content marketing,” secondly, they see content only in “text and writing,” and Third, the first and last media that comes to mind is the “website” and nothing else. In the rest of this article, we’ll cover content marketing, content marketing tips, content marketing campaigns, and content marketing examples.

What is Content Marketing Content Marketing?

Content marketing, in simple terms, helps to lead the way and ultimately sell-through “providing content” to the audience, which, if attractive and valuable, leads to the interest and trust of the audience, which plays a crucial role in turning the “audience into a customer.”

But as you know, this definition is the beginning of a series of ambiguities and misunderstandings. For example, what is “content,” and who is the “audience”? What is the difference between an audience and a customer, and how are this trust and interest achieved not “literally” but “practically”?

Let’s answer these questions:

In the article Introverted Marketing and its Difference with Extroverted Marketing, we also talked about the importance of content marketing and content production.

Content definition

“Content” is a message sent from a sender to a recipient. You can generate this content when you talk to your best friend on the subway, where “air” is the channel for transmitting information, and it is possible to exchange this information and content through language and ears. This emphasis is not to reduce the level of content to a blog post and the place of publication to the site.

Video, infographics, motion graphics, video interviews, podcasts, photos, etc., are all content and, apart from the site, social networks and email and SMS are common channels for publishing this content. These formats can play an influential role in attracting leads and Increasing sales this way.

 Essential Tips for Content Marketing Without Confusion:

Consider all formats in content marketing.

Which format is better for me?

First of all, You have to ask which content format is more appropriate for the subject? When you can take a short video of yourself with a mobile phone selfie camera, why look for an article or motion graphic? The sentence means that you should not have a “fixed presupposition” of content in your mind, and when you hear this word, you remember a specific format such as an article; First of all, you need to think about what format is suitable for this content. In the following, we will talk about the benefits of content marketing.

Consider all channels in content marketing.

Which channel is better for me?

Some people think that the content not published on the site is not content. The area here is the “publishing channel” of the content and has nothing to do with nature; Consider the same example above. Now that your 2-minute video is ready, based on your knowledge of content publishing channels, which ones do you think are best for increasing your sales? Instagram? Apart? Well, think about this question.

See which channel the “2-minute videos” of successful people is on the Internet? I say “Instagram,” in my opinion, but you act according to your opinion. A simple video about Google Ads was released at the Digital Marketing Academy a few years ago. This course is about answering the same ambiguities and questions.

In content marketing, good content reflects you.

It is the production of content to communicate honestly with the audience; The problem that can grieve you after choosing the format and channel is: “Well! I realized I had to make a 2-minute video and post it on my Instagram; “But the question is, what do I say in these two minutes, and how do I communicate well with the audience?”

The answer is the form and presentation of the content, which is inevitably very important in influencing the content to increase sales. As the saying goes, “What comes out of the heart must not sit in the heart.” This sentence is significant in various written and spoken content (text, video, and podcasts)! There is no magic formula for it. In general, when writing or speaking to an audience, things are to keep in mind.

In content marketing, be yourself, but be a business self!

Be yourself in your writing and speaking. As I said, you will not be a literary writer and participate in the Nobel Prize in Literature. You want to connect with several audiences and potentially increase your sales by producing content, so you have to You are, and you talk to your loved ones, talk to them.

However, this is especially true for small and personal businesses; otherwise, when we talk about companies like Safflower and Calais, this “you” no longer necessarily refers to a natural person who owns or manages the business. The main characters here are Safflower and Calais.

Since a company does not have its tone, you have to create a style. This tone is due to the nature of the brand and the type of business activity. . B2B business, highly industrial and even rude with limited customers such as Irankhodro and Saipa! The tone of the content of such a business is short, precise, and descriptive. Perhaps a formal email with attractive offers will respond better to the company than most common forms of content.

In content marketing, consider the language of the audience.

Your audience is not everyone. No business addresses everyone. Your audience is people with commonalities in several demographic, ethnographic, lifestyle, and psychological dimensions. Combining these features creates an overall image of your customer, which seems to represent you to your other customers and get to know them well. And select a hypothetical family. Review the customer journey.

For example, “Ali Heydari.” You need to consider the tone of the person and the person’s style because, in the end, your customer is the person, and you need to get to know them well to sell your product to them.

Remember that many students complain about how many of their literate professors teach. The reason is that there is no familiar tone between the student and the teacher. The same thing happens with content. Therefore, the most appropriate way to present the content in the visual, audio, and written form includes the honesty of that tone, simplicity, and matching the style of the content with the tone of the persona.

In content marketing, consider the product and service:

Think of the same pieces that piecemakers produce, descriptions with words, better tell their story or illustrate them? Clothing, jewelry, and cosmetics, for example, reveal glorious and tempting visual aspects, while a computer has a story that is good to express in words and even tables; Considering such a case in creating content for the product will affect your sales or non-sales.

Considering the capabilities and possibility of outsourcing in content marketing:

It would be excruciating if, after all these steps, I shouted, “I found it! I found!” But after a while, say realistically, “I know what content format to publish on what channel and how to present it, but I can’t do it!” For example, you have concluded that infographics and motion graphics are the best type of content for you.

But you do not have anyone in the company who can afford it. Expert expertise is needed, and the same goes for content. Content will sell to you, so you have to pay for it! If your workload is not enough to get full-time staff, you can outsource your content.

Content marketing according to a specific process

One of the reasons for the confusion in content production and, of course, the creative side effects of this work is the arbitrary and careless approach to the content production process. The content production process in most Iranian companies is as follows: “The boss looks at the content manager on Monday morning and says, ‘Write something like this today!’

“On Wednesday next week, the boss looks at the content manager again and says, ‘Write something about Bahmani today!'” It is as if the whole order in this process is the intersection of the boss’s gaze with the content manager and being paired that day!

Targeting, audience, content strategy, content calendar, content production, content publishing, content promotion, and analysis and reporting of the content production process.

  • Targeting Content Production (Content Marketing Goals) Indicates our goal in content marketing activities. For example, the plan could capture traffic to turn it into a sales funnel; specifically, this goal must be specific, measurable, accessible, relevant, and time-bound. For example, content activities should bring 10,000 daily users to the site within six months. Increasing social network followers or improving the site ranking can be other goals.
  • As mentioned, by knowing the audience’s personality, you can determine which audience and with which character these content activities you can perform?
  • Content Strategy Sounds like a mouth-watering phrase, yet the truth is that Content Strategy is practically nothing more than a headline for our previous explanation! Reaching the goals after defining the “how” and “focusing” on the “what” is related to the content strategy. Consider the goal of increasing traffic. How can this goal be achieved? By presenting a video on a social network? By preparing textual content or podcasts? What are the steps to increase traffic through article writing? Your content strategy determines these.
  • The editorial calendar regulates content marketing activities. The content marketing calendar specifies “strategy execution tactics.” We will talk about the editorial calendar in more detail later.
  • In the content production sector, we enter the executive phase; For example, you can, and you can obtain the result.
  • In the content publishing section, the content is published on the channel and presented to the audience.

  • Since the capacity of a track to attract an audience is limited. Content must be “promoted.” For this reason, the content is so-called “promoted” in other media, whether ours or others, to increase its broad scope of influence.

  • Content creation is significant. Some people always complain that they have “limited” helpful content and are not interested in using poor-quality content. In response, this sentence is better to say that content with a subject can have different forms and bodies. This sentence is what we call “content re-creation.” Suppose you were able to write an excellent article. This sentence tells it is content. But is this content available only in the form of an article? You can make a podcast out of it. You can make a video or an interview about it. Even making an infographic seems plausible. So, in this case, you have content that you use in different formats.

  • In the content analysis phase, you analyze the content and feedback and its effectiveness with tools such as Google Analytics and hotjar . How many minutes did a particular content page engage the audience, generate a few hits, and direct the audience to what other pages? Which part of the content page did the audience focus on the most? You can examine all this in content analysis.
  • In the reporting phase, the content manager submits their report based on the research and the level of achievement of the goals to the relevant officials, who are usually the content manager and digital marketing manager, to evaluate the effectiveness of the content.
  • “Content Categorization,” according to the categories in the site, is specified in which types you can place the desired content.
  • In “Audience Personas,” you select your character. Note that you may have several personalities. I use code one here; This means that this is for person number 1, which must have specific characteristics.
  • The “Audience Position in the Funnel” section specifies which stage of the sales funnel this content has been in preparation? Is it going to turn the visitor into a clue or the clue into a customer?
  • In the “Content and CTA path” section, the call to action text specification is for the content. Note that the content must have a CTA and invite the audience to a specific landing page and action; As a result, you specify the text of this CTA and the landing page link in this section.

Storytelling in content marketing

Storytelling is essential in creating content, and the story can be about a specific brand, product, or category. You can even make unique characters and stories about or from their language. A while ago, on one of the social networks, I came across a page of a restaurant that offered traditional food.

Less than a year has passed since the establishment of this restaurant. However, many followers and, more importantly, the many comments on each post attracted my attention more to this page.

I found out more carefully in the posts that this restaurant has created two characters. An older woman and an older man! The older woman cooks food for the older man every day, and this becomes an excuse to talk about the aroma and taste of broth, stuffing, and crumbs! In this way, this restaurant creates a story, and by producing content in this way, the hot onion increases its food and sales.

View and receive input on content marketing:

The truth is that to produce unique content. You have to be eye-catching and pay attention to essential details. If you think of content production as a factory that produces a product called “content,” that factory will be a system with an output (content) resulting from receiving different inputs.

But what are the raw materials of this “content”? Words ?! Subjects and topics ?! OK! There is no directory for the issues and subjects. You have to look around the community and find matters related to your business to produce content. Imagine I ignored this Instagram page; As a result, I could not use it in my range.

Content marketing through writing

At the beginning of this article, we said that content is not the only “written” format and the only “publishing” website. However, now we want to emphasize the same form and channel.

Types of textual content

Types of textual content include articles, text-based interviews, PDF books, an event report, and more that you can use. The problem is to write or not to write! Once you get here, you have to start writing. Before that, you need to find an idea, but how is it possible to develop a vision for your writing?

One way to develop an idea is to use linguistic grammar logic to consider the “title” of an article; This title consists of nouns, adjectives, adverbs, adjectives, verbs, verbs.

And such structural components in language; Typically, the “keyword” occupies one of these positions, such as a noun or adjective. In this case, you are using the language permutation feature. Just as a combination of several numbers creates several other numbers, a variety of several words or their substitutes establishes several sentences.

  • The best “power banks” for Samsung’s mid-range phone
  • LG has introduced a dedicated handsfree for its new mobile phone
  • Everything about the GITEX showroom and the Nokia and Samsung booths
  • You will notice that from the combination of these words sentences, and as a result, You can create this new content for the content that can help your business and sales.

Content Ideation with Bozan Mental Storm:

Tony Bozan was a psychologist inspired by Alex Osborne, the inventor of the brainstorming session. He introduced the technique of mind mapping, a method that is very pioneering in creative creations today and has received much attention because of its fast and straightforward structure; 

For example, to create an idea in content marketing, where the author needs an idea, a mind map will help him.

 So it’s clear that you’re going to write about content marketing, But that’s not enough. What falls under ” content marketing ” at a lower level (in the smaller blue circle), what falls under “content marketing”? For example, “low-cost” Now, what is below the low-cost (purple process) or even across it (adjacent blue circle)? For example, congratulations to “small businesses”! The topic of your article was: “Low-Cost Content Marketing for Small Businesses.

A storytelling approach for a child, from dialogue to text

In this case, you assume that you are with a child, and you want to raise the issue with him in a conversational way. So get started! Record your voice even if necessary. Produce the content of the article conversationally and orally. In the next step, please write down the content of the conversation and put it on paper; Finally, organize the written content of the conversation. Please choose the correct language and tone and implement it using the captions.

Approach to answering questions:

In this approach, you first think about what questions the audience for whom you are producing the content they seek to address. For example, suppose you provide a magazine called “10 places of interest in the north of Tehran”. Suppose you are producing content for someone who does not know the north of Tehran and, therefore, its places of interest. You would like to have better leisure time by solving this problem. So please hurry up introduce him to the north of Tehran sights, of course, you need to know the north of Tehran and views!

Megapasts, or ” skyscraper ” articles, are comprehensive articles on a topic that cover 0 to 100 cases, and by reading that topic, you will solve all the questions about it. For example, the article “The Importance of Digital Marketing” published is one mega pest.

Megapost can attract a lot of traffic. The high traffic and pause of the audience on the page, which is a result of the comprehensiveness & richness of the article, also informs Google that it is on the side of an important article and puts it in the appropriate rankings. Although preparing a mega pest is a bit difficult and time-consuming, it is as if you have designed dozens of ordinary articles by preparing a few mega passes.

Update regular articles instead of mega posts in content marketing

If for any reason, you do not have the ability or interest to produce a mega-post at once, you can create a mega pest over time by constantly updating a regular article! For example, you know things about content marketing that are not necessarily comprehensive; Publish it in the form of an essay. With constant updates, after several updates, you will have a complete report that is precisely one mega post.

Answering Frequently Asked Questions as Content in Content Marketing:

If you read the Instagram step-by-step guide for beginners to professionals on the IranSocal site, you will come across more than 40,000 words that provide complete content in the form of answers to questions. You can update such content as a strategic asset for It’s the content of the website and even the whole business. You answer essential questions and increase your sales by clearing up the ambiguity. Just as easily!