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As the digital marketing industry is constantly shifting, so is the need for content marketing as an essential baseline niche of it. Frankly speaking, content is the medium through which brands can hope to properly establish a relationship with their consumer audience. And, as the demographics and attitudes are constantly shifting, there is a need to look at the most relevant best practices for the year 2019. From website content to other more recently popularized media representations, all of them are shaking up the entire industry in very short intervals. 

So, these are the best practices for content marketing strategies that you must be completely aware of while you are devising, or actually creating some content right now.

Projection of some pre-formed targets is a foundational cornerstone in marketing, and it is pretty important for any company to strategize a marketing plan. This plan would have to be extensively researched, and the insights derived should effectively be in line with the goals of any organization concerned. Outbound or inbound marketing content strategy has rarely been of greater importance as it is of this moment, and doing so would give you a clear idea about what you need to do in achieving such goals effectively.

While written content still acquires a central form of importance, people today are starting to prefer such forms of media like videos, podcasts,  and informational posters. Content marketing tools have never been so varied and numerous as they are now. What content creators and marketers can actually get, however, by utilizing such formats is the option to apply their endless wells of creativity to fully entice and capture attention. But, retaining it for a long period of time is an entirely different matter altogether.

The quality of content has far superseded in terms of importance as compared to what the content is actually trying to achieve. End consumers have become greatly aware of what they may consider as ‘clickbait’, and as a result, value any unique or personally relevant piece of content more than anything else. It is very important to make the content marketing experience unique, creative and entertaining, while also getting your point across what the audience should do. Doing so would raise the effectiveness of content marketing strategy by many folds.

The term, ‘influencers’, tend to portray pretty inaccurate picture in the minds of many companies who require them. It is, however, important to remember that the relationship between a talented influencer and your marketing team is very important. Effective partnerships beget creativity, and any relevant content marketing business model also speaks of a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship.

You can also look towards B2B marketing statistics to know who exactly is in most need, as well as would be suitable for your areas of expertise in the best way imaginable. However, it is important to be completely aware of the above-mentioned move mentioned trends, which will sure shift greatly in the near future.   

In today’s age, CRM – Customer Relationship Management is arguably the most significant part of the day-to-day workings of any company. Customers give any company it’s value, recognition and reputation. CRM requires planning the future course of action to keep aligned with the company’s path. This has to be done with the strategic management of an organization’s relationships with current, as well as potential future customers.

Though it seems like a fancy new term, CRM has been in practice for over decades by small and big businesses alike. And over time it has shown businesses around the world how connecting with their customers helps improve decision making. This helps in increasing profitability through feedback and review.

Now that almost everyone is onto the bandwagon of CRM, there arises a need to find ourselves an edge. This brings a relatively new, but highly growing field – Predictive analysis.

Predictive analysis is, on paper, as simple as it sounds. It involves the prediction of new, upcoming trends. It does so through the analysis of data collected on the market.. Then they are used to improve various aspects of the company’s plans and strategies.

In reality, a lot of work goes inside this. Special teams mine through the data and run it through statistical models. This helps to search for trends, deviations and analyze them. Application of specifically designed technology like AI-programs and machine learning plays a significant role.

Predictive analysis is a tool which plays a big role in the process of Content Marketing. It is always crucial for a company to ensure it does its content marketing right. Properly used strategies of content marketing reduce the losses from digital marketing while working towards improving the profits.

These benefits include getting higher ‘organic’ reach by being at the right place at the right time. When you thoroughly study your audience, you see their behavior patterns. You notice trends. You see when does your audience prefer to use Facebook, Instagram or Reddit. You even get an idea about when your target audiences check their mail, and how often.

These trends are extremely useful in digital marketing as you can place your content accordingly. High traffic to your pages can be achieved through successful digital marketing. After all, digital marketing is the form of content marketing with the highest reach.

Content marketing should ensure that it provides the audience with the answers they need. Providing relevant and reliable information is the key to success.

Also, this portrays your brand’s story to wider audiences and demonstrates your authority in the market. Our current age of technology has given us numerous ways to do so efficiently through content marketing.

All this does a lot in boosting your email campaigns.

What do you need to do? Just follow the following:

1. Organize your mailing lists based on age, gender, location, and interests.
2. Perform email surveys to get to know people’s preferences
3. Create and maintain a brand image for yourself through social media interactions
4. Build a sense of loyalty and trust for the audiences

These steps, along with proper content marketing strategies helps boost your email campaigns like never before. And any business aiming to be successful can’t afford to miss it.

Amit Kapoor currently is the Associate Director, Content Marketing at Cigniti Technologies. Amit is responsible for the end-to-end design, development, and implementation of the Content Marketing activities of Cigniti. He is responsible for continuously developing global content marketing strategies for NA, UK, and APAC regions, and overseeing all marketing & content initiatives, both internal and external, across multiple platforms and formats.

Amit has been recognized as LinkedIn Content50-2018 and India’s Top 100 Content/Brand Custodian-2017 by Paul Writer, the Global Top 200 Content Strategist-2017 by Mind Touch, & the Most Influential Content Marketing Professional by the World Marketing Congress (2017, 2018). In this conversation Amit talks about how Content Marketing as a function has evolved over the years at Cigniti Technologies.

Santosh: Content Marketing is seen as an integral part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. During your tenure at Cigniti Technologies, how has the efforts and budget for content marketing evolved in the organization?

Amit: In the initial days of my joining, the focus of content marketing was more on creating relevant and quality content consistently that would be spread across multiple social media platforms. I am happy to note that we were able to generate and refresh a lot of content on a regular basis. In my tenure of 4 years at Cigniti, I have seen the budget allocated for content marketing grow considerably to include critical investments being made in spends on AdWords, running campaigns, and a lot more activities.

Santosh: In the Survey, you mentioned that Creating topics that make readers click the content as the top challenge you face while developing a Content marketing strategy. For our subscribers can you define top ways to tackle it? Also, how technology plays a role here?

Amit: While writing content that connects well with the audience (that leads to prospect and clients for the organizations) is a prime focus of content marketing, it’s a big challenge to get readers to click/open the blogs/other collaterals being published. The open rates of many emailers, blogs published are usually very low. While the challenge is big, we keep reading and researching articles on the latest trends that are published on portals such as Forbes, Medium, Mashable, Buzzsumo, Huffington Post, Tech Crunch, Livemint, and more to understand what kind of content and titles are being created, and read, by the decision makers and influencers. We then try to create titles and content, aligning it with the independent quality engineering and software testing services that Cigniti provides for multiple industries.

Santosh: How would you rate your organization’s proficiency with the use of content marketing technology? Which are the key tools that assist your content marketing efforts?

Amit: I would like to say that at Cigniti we are continuously exploring the latest tools and platforms when it comes to implementing content marketing technologies. A few tools that we are exploring and using are Buzzsumo, Buffer, Hubspot, Ahrefs, and Google analytics.

Santosh: How has the use of Social Media for Content Marketing changed in Cigniti, compared with one year ago?

Amit: In the past year, we made a lot of significant changes in using Social Media for Content Marketing at Cigniti. We started with performing research in the type of content published on various platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest. We read multiple reports and articles that talked about the right frequency of posting, the best days and timing for posting on these platforms, as well as the best-suited content for each platform. While we achieved decent growth with the implemented changes, there’s a long way to go!

Santosh: How successful is your organization at tracking the ROI of content marketing? What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success?

Amit: At Cigniti, we track the quality of our Leads (Marketing and Sales qualified), the Web Traffic, the kind of onsite engagement we generate, the SEO success of our content, and more.

Santosh: What all do you think the Content Marketing Done Right: Trends and Best Practices Report, 2019 should cover?

Amit: I would like to see the report try to cover the practices that really work in generating leads and clients for the organizations instead of generic thoughts. A lot of reports are just numbers and statistics collected from multiple organizations – I hope your report on best practices actually explains a few!

Gaurav Suri is a curious and passionate Sales and Marketing professional having straddled across industries. He is currently the Sr Executive Vice President and Head of Marketing at UTI mutual funds, and working at the intersection of data, technology and consumer insights. Gaurav is also a part of the industry initiative by AMFI and member of financial literacy committee developing communication for Mutual Fund Sahi Hai campaign.

In this conversation, Gaurav talks about how Content Marketing has evolved as a vital part of the marketing mix and complements the overall marketing strategy. He also explains the best practices of Content distribution which he has implemented at UTI mutual funds.

Santosh: How do you strategize segment content at UTI mutual funds?

Gaurav: Content has always been integral to a marketer. It is the medium through which a product talks to its consumers. The nature format form factor and measurement of the content have changed with the popularity and growth of technology.

The core objective of UTI mutual fund is to democratize access for Indian household to Indian capital market by offering investment solutions. Since this is a regulated category, most of the content seems Greek for the customers. The primary objective of our content strategy is to make it more simplified contextual and relatable. Lot of times the content might be likable but might not do anything for business.

The human brain is programmed to identify risk and then take all steps to mitigate that risk. That is why for our content strategy we try to priorities fear of loss over reward or gain. From a segmentation point of view, we have around 8-10 personas built for our practice. Most of our products and ideas in the rural segment are sold through videos and vernacular based contents. The key here is to create storytelling content because if you tell products to them, then they will not be able to relate. The usefulness of the product in their daily life in the form of the story stay with them longer.

Santosh: How has the effectiveness of different content format evolved over the years?

Gaurav: Segmentation plays a role in deciding on the effectiveness of the content type. In the recent past, the way advertising was done, either above the line or below the line, was mostly one-way communication. With the advent of mobile and internet, it has become interactive. It’s not how the effectiveness of format has changed, but it’s how the different audience is consuming it. Therefore, we need to be present on every format.

We were one of the first AMCs to start investor education on a large scale under the platform of Swatantra. Today it has taken the shape of its own and became a multimedia delivery platform. We probably have the largest print outreach in the country today with 14 publications having a full page released fortnightly. We are there on radio, TV and social media.

The ability to create content at scale and frequently is the capability building exercise at our end. When we launched our investor education campaign, we made a journey of 54,000 km. We did a physical on-ground activation, during which we created short films in 10-11 languages. Role of different goals of our different solutions from a life stage perspective was woven into the content. These short films started conversation, engagement, and questions. With time we have discovered crowd sourced, long form or short story formats along with the form factor. We also started making more concise content for digital medium also.

Santosh: What metrics do you use to measure content marketing success?

Gaurav: If I have to categories metrics to measure the effectiveness of content, then it will be the volume of visits also called an impression on social media and traffic on the website. The second will be the quality of visits, which is the final onboarding of the prospect on the platform and last will be the value of the visits which is the revenue generated. On social media, we do klout scoring which gives us a quantifiable measure. We also use a framework used by a content marketing institute, useful for financial services perspective. It is a 2×2 matrix, on one axis you have at extremes like rational and emotional and on the other axis, you have the awareness to purchase. Where it is about emotional and creating awareness then we classify that type of content as entertainment. If it’s emotional and makes you do the purchase, we classify it an inspiring content. This helps us to know how to build, present and relate the content to your audience.

Santosh: How do you source and manage content campaign/operation?

Gaurav: We work with extended partners. To work with partners, you need people internally who understand the domain for able to have a conversation. It’s a journey which we started way back on email marketing, SEO or social media with outsourced emailing platform technology but now we our building our own in-house marketing automation suite. Over the years we have stacked up a ton of tools and it was getting very siloed. Time taken to integrate all these tools was very huge. Now we are in the process of implementing our own marketing automation tool, with which we will be able to integrate all activities of analytics, customer experience, and engagement.

Sourcing of content is done again through empaneled partners who we have cultivated over a few years and now we understand their strengths in various formats / form factors. We use them to build content. For the print partnership we have a central editorial board cutting across partnerships headed by a respectable journalist. The management of content is done through the framework explained earlier

Santosh: What are your biggest content marketing challenges?

Gaurav: Content tends to be considered as a separate discipline because of the noise around it. My number one challenge as discussed earlier is how can I integrate content with all the other pieces which I handle. Whether it is for internal or external dissemination, the storytelling is an integral part of the business whether it is data, digital or consumer insights campaign. Any activity be it be educating investors, product campaign or digital onboarding, content sits at the center of it. To ensure that customer is having a seamless experience right from pre sales, onboarding to post sales our automation suite will be of great use which we will be implementing soon. Another challenge which we face is the measurement and scalability in a timely manner. We cannot use the same measurement metrics for all formats/ form factors. We also need more people versed with technology to repurpose and create content at a faster pace

Every year, March 8 is celebrated as International Women’s Day. The day marks the fact that the unstoppable new generation women across the world have overcome all negative notions and have proved themselves in all domains of Business. They have become a dominating force in industries that were once considered taboo for women. Over the past years, there has been a slow but steady growth of women in leadership positions in India. The companies have realized the need to unleash the potential for business growth through a gender diversified workforce. 

While implementing a content marketing strategy, it does not matter if you are getting started or an established player. Your website is vital for the plan. Creating good content takes more time than it is. So, you should have a time-saving process at your end to get it distributed and published. This is when the Content Management System (CMS) comes in!

A CMS can help you to get your content to publish, distribute wild and optimize your conversions. Content marketing is more than just blogs. It can be your website which can be a hub for whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, videos, etc. The content management systems continue to evolve, and with that, the expectations from the CMS is increasing. We could see the continued development of the features marketers are demanding. For your strategy to be robust, full-proved, efficient, your CMS should have cutting-edge features to make your content marketing strategy a great success.

Below are the top features that a CMS should have to help you reach your goals:

1) Content Creation: Good and engaging content is a result of strategic thinking and understanding of business. A CMS can help you get your content pieces to move in harmony. Stages to enable approvals, allows different users to roll out their inputs in a structured manner, keeping it scheduled to hold your team one step ahead.

2) Email Marketing: Email Marketing is so far the best method to reach customers and for campaigns to scale their marketing efforts. A CMS should have email features like- Personalised emails, triggered emails, group emails, scheduled messages, and recording customer behavior.

3 Content Support: A CMS could support your content strategy by providing a flexible platform and allowing a variety of contents. We know that digital media is here and is here for the long run, and blogs are not the only type. This means there should be a clear way to manage content regardless of its kind. Videos are engaging and no doubt in the future, videos will make up to 80% of online traffic.

4) SEO tools: A content marketer should be an SEO expert. The traffic that SEO can bring in is low cost, faster at lead conversions and takes less effort and time. And while SEO factors have a variable impact — it’s not like they’re all equally weighted — it’s important to hit as many as possible to secure the best organic ranking you can. A CMS can help you hear. Built-in SEO can help you with targeted keywords while you create your content, keyword density calculations, automated XML sitemap submissions.

5) Integrated Sharing: Content production is only halfway through a content marketing strategy. The other half is the distribution of your content. A CMS could help you to expand your content to a wider audience if there are integrated platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, etc. You can make your audience share your content through social media including Tweet options, share on Facebook. Also, you can get your content to appear on social media with least of efforts and time.

6) Accessibility, Analytics, and Tracking: On publishing your content through social media, videos, blogs, newsletters and many other channels it is most likely you slip-on ease of accessibility. CMS centralizes all your content activity in one place and gives you compliance for your new content.

A CMS should have a Tracking and Analytics feature. Because if you can’t track the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, then there is no point in pouring content. You should know what is working and what’s not.

What content attracts the audience? What content keeps the audience engaged? How much time your audience spending on content? A CMS should analyse all these questions and give you a report to track the effectiveness of your content strategy.

7) Ease to capture Leads: The objective of your Content Management strategy is to drive sales in the most cost-effective method. Hence, your CMS should capture the Leads in the easiest ways. An efficient CMS should have integration to some of the major platforms at your end like Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The integration capabilities should be simple and require minimal staff training. API access to integrate with existing tools, third-party applications is a plus.