I Learned How Content Marketing Works in 1 Month
- Alexander Radha Portfolio Projects
- Oct 31, 2023
- 6 min read
Over the past four weeks, I have learned what it takes and means to do Content Marketing as part of my Praxis journey. At its core, content marketing is exactly what it sounds like: you take content and market it. But when we look inside the process of it all, there’s a lot more to break down than what you would think.
Week 1: A Business to Market
Week 1 of Content Marketing was the big content consumption week. There was plenty of reading but all of it was valuable information I was able to use throughout the rest of the four week module. I found a HubSpot article on Content Marketing to be the most helpful.
The article goes through different types of content marketing as well as outlining insightful examples and strategies you can use to get started. After reading it and taking some notes, alongside reading through every other lesson, it was time to select a business to market for. I looked through some small companies with little marketing presence but continually found myself straying back towards large established companies with existing marketing teams and campaigns. I racked my head for a couple days trying to figure everything out when it hit me. I asked my mentor about my idea and he approved it. I had decided to use my own budding YouTube brand, Metal Tops Inc, as the business for this module.
The idea behind this decision was not at all because of the inherent advantages of using a company I was already familiar with. In fact it was quite different. I chose to use Metal Tops Inc because of the opportunity to apply these skills of content marketing I was about to learn directly to my own growing business.
The last part of Week 1, aside from the weekly newsletter, was doing market research on the business we chose. This was the only advantage I was able to utilize in choosing Metal Tops Inc. For a YouTube brand centered around Beyblade as a hobby and a sport, my audience would be typically between the ages of 13-35. The primary gathering spot is on YouTube itself, but the secondary outlets that see the most traffic are Instagram and Discord. That was all for week one.
Week 2: Landing Pages
Week 2 was focused entirely on creating a landing page for the business. A landing page is a simple one page website with the purpose of getting viewers to commit to an action. In the case of Metal Tops Inc, the call to action (CTA) was for people to check out the YouTube channel. Even if they don’t subscribe, traffic and views on the content will reflect well on the channel.
The first part was creating a mockup. We were encouraged to draw the mockup on paper. However, possessing web design skills already, I opted to just create it on Wix. I had already created a dedicated website for Metal Tops Inc on Wix so creating a single page with a call to action would be a breeze. The key parts of the landing page I needed to think about were the grabber, the hook, customer reviews, and CTA. The hook was using buzz words like “weekly”, “innovative”, and “events” to convey that I’m active often, always improving, and engaging in viewer interaction. The grabber was the video file that plays in the back, which was a mashup of different clips I had used in YouTube videos until that point. The customer reviews were easy, simply screenshot some positive YouTube comments. Lastly was the CTA, which became a simple button that takes you to the main channel. Overall, I think the mockup came out pretty good.
I could have kept the mockup as the official landing page, but I wanted to challenge myself a little bit and opted to use one of the recommended softwares for creating the actual landing page. I decided to use Carrd to build the official landing page. While it isn’t the smoothest looking page, I still put effort into. I don’t think it looks bad by any means, but I do prefer the Wix page.
The concept behind it was to make the page look like an actual card. In that aspect, it looks pretty good. But as something to attract new viewers, I would recommend they visit the Wix site instead.
Week 3: Campaigns
The calendar week during Week 3 was absolutely wild for me. On top of having to sort out a nail in my car’s tire, I also had a busier schedule than previously. I didn’t get around to starting the lessons until very late in the week, and I didn’t even get everything done on time. Nonetheless, I pressed on and continued regardless. It didn’t matter if I was late, I was determined to follow through and complete everything.
Week 3 was broken down into two separate campaigns: Social Media Marketing and Email Marketing.
Email Marketing had me banging my head against the wall all week. It’s one thing to do a social media marketing campaign for a YouTube channel, but how do I sell people on a YouTube channel over email? It took a while but eventually I came up with the solution. I emailed my mentor about it and he approved the concept. I would create the email campaign around a hypothetical merchandise and Beyblade product store. With that step done, it became a little easier, but I was still running into issues with actually writing the emails. After consulting some of my peers about it, I concluded that I should just start writing and work the kinks out after it was written. The end result was this:
The goal for this campaign was offering exclusive deals through the emails. The structure was designed mainly based off of an article from Active Campaign.
The structure was followed a little loosely in order to work in the concept of increasing the discount percentages. This meant every email was essentially the sell email, just with different beginnings before mentioning the discounts. Even though we didn’t have to send the emails out, I still found this part of the module the most challenging.
The Social Media Marketing campaign on the other hand was somewhat of a breeze for me. The idea behind it was to create a minimum of 15 posts to be distributed over the course of one week. While email isn’t the most common way to market a YouTube channel, social media definitely is. The majority of big YouTube brands and personalities have accounts on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Facebook, etc. Metal Tops Inc has accounts on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Discord. However, for this campaign to be effective, I narrowed my range down to the three most viewed accounts for Metal Tops Inc, YouTube, Instagram, and Discord. The campaign I designed in the end looked like this:
The post total in the end reached 21, six more than required, however this wasn’t a big problem. I made a brief video summary going deeper into the process of how I handled the social media marketing campaign which I’ll embed down here for you to watch!
While Week 3 was a slow and tough battle, I learned a lot first hand, and this experience will definitely stick with me for the rest of my career. Definitely my favorite week, if hectic at times.
Week 4: Reflection
Week 4 of this module was focused on documenting everything and ultimately reflecting on the first three (in this case about four) weeks of the module.
Ultimately, despite the setbacks I had to endure, the biggest overall lesson I learned from the module was about the role strategy plays in content marketing. It’s one thing to market content, but it’s another thing to reach people through your marketing campaign. Researching the market you plan to broadcast to, understanding trends, maximizing the effect of your content over pumping it out as frequently as possible, and being smart in general about how you design everything is really the biggest key to content marketing. Without a plan, everything becomes compoundingly more difficult as you forge ahead.
I’m definitely most proud of the campaign I ran for my YouTube brand. Metal Tops Inc did see the growth I predicted, even if it didn’t reach the subscriber goal within the week. That didn’t even matter in the end however as we reached 62 subscribers on Monday, just shortly after I completed the summary video! With Metal Tops Inc in general, I have big plans and ideas that I hope to bring to the channel in the near future. Being able to create effective campaigns to market these ideas is an invaluable and indispensable skill I now possess that will surely bring me great success.
Be sure to check out Metal Tops Inc at https://www.youtube.com/@MetalTopsInc/featured, where you can also find links to my main website and other social media accounts.
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