Content to Sales: The 4 Essential Pillars of Content Marketing

Everyone is doing content marketing these days. Some 80% of respondents say they are doing content marketing according to 2017 survey data.Yet I worry about some of the efforts I’ve seen or heard about. This is because they are missing some of the essential pillars you must have to grow the program and demonstrate the benefit to the business.These essential pillars are a combination of process and vehicle. You can also think about these in stages of content marketing maturity. However, I’d caution, you never done with any given stage. Improvement is a continuous process.To build an audience you have to get visitors to your content hub. To do this you have to focus on your audience needs, not what you want to tell them.One of the best examples of this comes from marketing automation vendors. Many of them realized that CMOs have struggled to find digital talent.It’s pretty hard to sell a product to a target market that doesn’t have the human capital to manage automation software. Consequently, the smart vendors started focusing on tips for talent management and acquisition.Think about the concerns of your target market, list them, and then try to categorize them into overarching themes for editorial focus.