How to Create Epic Marketing Content: 12 Steps & Tactics

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What’s the secret to any successful marketing strategy?

Great content.

While that sounds simple enough, what exactly is great content? How do you create it, and how do you measure the success of your content marketing efforts?

This depends on a few essential factors, like who you’re creating the content for and what channel you’re publishing it on. Although, there’s a lot that goes into determining what makes your content marketing strategy compelling. 

Before you start posting on social media or creating videos, you need to follow a few guidelines to create truly great marketing content. 

All it takes is a few basic steps, and your entire content marketing plan will achieve better results. 

How to Create Great Marketing Content

Here’s the good news – creating powerful marketing content is actually a lot easier than you think. In order to do this, you need to follow seven essential steps. These steps apply to any kind of online content marketing. 

Let’s break these down. 

1. Start With a Goal

Your marketing content cannot be considered successful if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. 

The first necessary step in any content marketing strategy is setting goals. Establish what you want your content to achieve, and implement clear, measurable KPIs that you can use to track the performance of your content in line with your goals. 

Different forms of content can have different goals. In fact, your business can apply all kinds of different goals to one content strategy. For example, content goals could include:

  • Building brand awareness
  • Growing your mailing list
  • Generating more social media engagement
  • Sending traffic to your eCommerce store
  • Increasing online bookings
  • Increasing sales

And so on. 

Always establish a goal for each piece of content you create and general goals for each content marketing channel you use. This way, you can structure each piece of content around an actionable goal to help it make a clear impact. This should generally involve applying a CTA of some kind.

Whatever content marketing strategies or channels you use, having clear goals is essential for making them a success.

Here’s a helpful diagram outlining some of the top content marketing goals related to different stages of the customer journey.

content marketing goals

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2. Know Your Audience

If you want to create great content, you need to have a solid grasp of your target audience. To help you figure this out, you can follow our complete guide to finding your target audience

This is necessary because it lets you discover:

  • What types of content your clearly defined audience wants to see
  • Where they want to find this content
  • What kinds of topics, pain points, and questions your content covers

Your content couldn’t be compelling if you don’t know what your audience wants from your content. 

So, establish their desires and address this in your content pieces. You should also understand your brand’s unique market positioning and USP and incorporate this into your content. 

This will help you create more valuable content that appeals to the people you want it to reach. 

3. Know the Customer Journey

Just like you need to understand your target audience, you also need to understand the journey they take with your brand. Compelling marketing content is all about targeting people with relevant content at each stage of their buying journey. 

This includes:

  • Top-level marketing content: Content that generates awareness
  • Mid-level marketing content: Content that builds engagement
  • Low-level marketing content: Content that drives conversions
marketing funnel

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Compelling marketing content uses the right topics, formats, and information to appeal to customers at these different stages. This will help your content have an impact and eventually turn your audience into customers.

You can check out our guide to bottom-of-funnel marketing strategies for examples. 

The best tip here is to establish what intent, or level of the marketing funnel, your content aims to target before you create it. This will help you understand what your audience will want from the content, which is necessary for creating content that makes an impact. 

4. Understand Your Marketing Channels

Great content depends on the channel it’s being published on. Each marketing channel is unique, and content performs differently on each channel. 

If you want your content to be successful, you need to understand what content audiences on each channel want to engage with. 

You can follow our actionable guide on how to choose the right marketing channels for your brand for more details. 

The bottom line is that you know what channels align with your target audience and their buying journey. Then understand what type of content best suits each platform. 

And if you create content across multiple channels, optimize this content for the channel you’re distributing it on. The same content won’t always work in different places. 

5. Inform, Educate, Entertain, Inspire

These four words are the fundamentals of great marketing content. Whether its a blog post or a video, your content should:

  • Inform
  • Educate
  • Entertain
  • Inspire

It can do one of these things or all of them. Whatever the case, make sure to keep these elements in mind when creating content. Of course, align the right elements here with your initial content marketing goals. 

If your content doesn’t meet any of these elements, your audience will be bored and uninterested when consuming the content. 

So, before you create a piece of content, try to establish how you will target one (or more) of these elements. 

Take a look at this helpful image that breaks down the best types of content for these different purposes.

content marketing matrix

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6. Measure Your Results

You can only call content successful if it helps you achieve your goals. To understand this, you’ll need to measure the performance of your content. 

This involves measuring the KPIs you established alongside your initial goals. 

One thing that many brands get wrong is following the wrong metrics. For example, you could have a blog post that generates loads of traffic or a video that gains millions of views. However, if the traffic or views aren’t converting, then your content isn’t really successful. 

It’s better to have a low-volume page on your site that generates customers than a high-volume page that does nothing. Make sense? 

So, establish goals, monitor how your content is achieving these goals, and optimize your content for better results. This is really all it takes to create compelling marketing content. 

  1. Measure Your Content’s ROI

Compelling, successful marketing content should yield a positive return on investment. 

Understanding the time and energy spent creating your marketing content is always a good idea, as it helps you assess whether it’s worthwhile for your brand. 

Here’s a guide that details how you can measure your marketing ROI. You can apply this to your content to measure its success. 

However, ROI isn’t always financial. Understand the time and effort content marketing tasks, and assess whether this is worth the results you’re getting. If not, it may be best to change and optimize your content strategy to achieve a more clear and more positive ROI. 

5 Tips for Creating Compelling Marketing Content

Now you know the fundamentals of creating great marketing content. Although, this is really just a high-level overview. 

To help you get into the nitty gritty and create truly epic marketing content, you’ll need to really fine-tune your content creation skills. 

Here are some of the best tips, tactics, and strategies to help you achieve this.

1. Use a Content Calendar

An essential strategy for creating great marketing content is using a content calendar. This helps you:

  • Stay organized
  • Follow a consistent content schedule
  • Ensure your content covers the right topics

Using a content calendar can help you plan out your content well in advance. This lets you be strategic about the kind of keywords you target, the intent your content is focused on, and what stage of the buying journey your content is covering.

Try to lay out at least one month’s worth of content in advance. Now, you can establish a strategic plan for the topics and articles that make the most sense for your brand. 

This will also help you establish a good content distribution plan, which is important for the success of your digital marketing strategy. 

Here’s a content calendar template that you can make a copy of. It’s an ideal way to plan out any kind of content for your brand. 

content marketing calendar

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2. Mix Things Up

The digital world is always changing. What your target audience was interested in isn’t always necessary right now. This means it’s important that you always try new things, follow new ideas, and test different tactics for your content. 

If it doesn’t work, no problem. You’ve tried. But if you try something new and see results, you might have just covered a powerful new marketing channel and approach. 

So, always be aware of different marketing channels, content formats, and ideas to cover, and always experiment with your content strategy. 

The more you do this, the more creative your content creation process will get. It will also help you create better, more engaging content. 

3. Keep Creating New Content

Content marketing is all about being consistent. The more you publish, the better the results you’ll get. This is true with any kind of content strategy – like SEO, video marketing, and more. 

Ensure you’re always creating and publishing content. Doing so will:

  • Improve the reach of your content
  • Help you target more keywords and increase visibility
  • Provide more valuable resources to your audience
  • Develop more authority and trust
  • Create a deeper site architecture with more internal links

So, be consistent. Publish quality content all the time, and you’ll gradually see an ongoing improvement in your content marketing efforts. 

4. Get Inspired By Other Brands

You’ve got to stay on top of the competition in order to create great content. 

A major factor in marketing content is outperforming your competitors. This generally involves stealing some of their ideas and adding your own spin to them. 

Ensure you stay current with thought leaders and experts in your industry. Follow their content, and see how you can use this to get inspired and create your own content.

Also, perform an analysis of your competitor’s content marketing efforts and see what kind of content is helping them achieve the best results. This could shed some light on content ideas, channels, topics, and tactics you could cover. 

Never stop exploring and researching. This is essential for great content creation. 

5. Make the Most Of Your Content

Don’t stop once you’ve published a piece of content! Promote it, distribute it, and repurpose it across other channels. This will help you achieve a stronger ROI with each piece of content you publish. 

Let’s say you create a blog post. Turn this into social media content, share it on different platforms, and possibly even create a video on the same topic. This way, you get one piece of content and use it to reach more people and build a larger content marketing web. 

It’s not only about creating new content. This will take a lot more effort. Instead, it’s about making the most of each piece of content you already have. This will help you generate better results with each piece of content your brand publishes. 

Conclusion

Follow these tactics and steps, and you’ll be on the right path to creating amazing marketing content. 

The important thing is creating content that matches what your audience wants to see. Use the right channels to promote your content effectively, and be consistent with your content creation efforts. Get this right, and your marketing content will be much more compelling.

Looking for more ideas, inspiration, and best practices around content marketing? Check out some of our guides below.

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