Setting up Your Content Marketing Engine

A “content marketing engine” is a repeatable system for creating, publishing, and promoting content designed to reach and convert your target customers.

Each piece of content is aimed at a specific stage of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, decision) and should lead to predictable and measurable results for your business. The desired results are typically traffic generation and new leads added to your database.

In this course, we’ll focus on written content in the form of blog posts as the primary medium for your content engine. While you don’t have to limit your content engine to written content, writing is often the best place to start. Blog posts can be easily repurposed into downloadable PDFs, conversations for a podcast, or talks for a conference.

Building the Engine

As a marketer, you have a duty to analyze and report on what you do and why you do it, and to learn and revise your actions based on these insights. Marketing in general, but content marketing specifically, is not an art; it’s a science. It takes robust systems, processes, and discipline to execute.

In the following sections, we’ll show you how to set up a predictable and scalable content marketing framework - step by step.

First, we’ll cover setting up core prerequisites like your content management system and analytics tracking. Next, we’ll show you how to turn anonymous traffic into known leads that you store in your database and increase brand awareness using retargeting.

Finally, we’ll show you how to set up and use a content calendar to ensure that your content engine is consistent and predictable.

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