Clouse
Designs

Content Marketing Done Right

Create content your audience actually wants and build a strategy that drives real results.

Attract, Convert, Close

Understand Your Buyers

To reach your audience, start by creating and publishing content — such as blog articles, content offers, and social media — that provide value. Examples include guides on how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts.

This will allow your content and information to organically appear on the search engine results page (SERP) for the people who are searching for this information — also known as your target audience or the right customers for your business.

Content Strategy

Content strategy is where it all begins.

Before you do anything else, including publishing content, you need to get clear on what the point of it all is.

This is where you figure out:

Audience research: Who you’re talking to.
Journey mapping: What you’re trying to get them to do.
Channel selection: Where and how you’re reaching them.
Topic selection: What you’re talking to them about.
Project management: How your team will get it all done.

Plus how to optimize it all to maximize your results.

And like the rest of the elements listed here, content strategy isn’t something you can just do once.

While your strategy only needs to be built from scratch when you’re first getting started with content marketing, it still needs to be revisited and updated around once or twice a year.

Content Creation

Once you’ve developed or updated your content strategy, you’re ready to start creating content.

But even that is more than just content creation.

Here’s what I mean:

Content, no matter the format or channel, is most difficult and time-consuming to create when you dive right into creation without any planning.

The full content creation process includes lots of different types of tasks, and trying to do them all at the same time adds unnecessary struggle to the writing, designing, or recording process.

When you take time to research your topic, outline the structure, brain dump your talking points, and more to prepare before you start writing, things get a lot easier.

This is still true with less writing-focused formats, like podcasts and video, in terms of writing the script, show notes, and more.

Break down the process and tackle your content projects one at a time in small steps instead of trying to tackle everything at once.

Content Optimization

Just like there’s more prep work than we initially think with the content we create, there’s more “post-work” too.

It doesn’t matter how high quality the writing or video is with your content if it isn’t optimized for your marketing strategy’s customer journey.

Or if it’s not discoverable for anyone who’s not specifically looking for it.

This means that in between creating content and publishing it, you need to optimize it for what comes before and after it in the buyer’s journey.

If you’re trying to generate leads, that means making sure you have lead gen forms in the right spots, promoting the right offers.

If you want to attract visitors through SEO, that means reviewing the optimization for your target keywords.

All of this optimization should be double-checked before content goes live.

Content Distribution

Once content has been planned, created, and optimized, it’s time to publish.

And yet the process still isn’t ready to start over yet.

People still need to find out about it.

Even if you have a site that brings in lots of organic traffic and gets discovered “on its own,” putting effort into distribution will still speed things up.

You’ll want to spend time on things like:

Sharing the new content on social media.
Emailing it to your list of subscribers and customers.
Sending it to influential people in your network who’d be interested.

Most of us have experienced the feeling of creating great content no one sees, and this is the step to prevent experiencing it.

Clouse Designs