Expert Content Marketing Strategies for Success: Tools, KPIs & More

By: Salloni Aroraa Nanda, Head of Marketing, Arvind Fashions Limited

With over 16 years of professional expertise in Branding, Retail, PR, Media Marketing, and digital marketing encompassing earned, owned, and paid strategies, Salloni brings a wealth of experience to the table. She holds an MBA in Management and Marketing from Nottingham Trent University, UK.

In a conversation with Women Entrepreneur Magazine, Salloni Aroraa Nanda, Head of Marketing at Arvind Fashions Limited, shares her views and thoughts on what content marketing tools and technologies are most valuable, as well as how business leaders determine the budget for a content marketing strategy.

In your opinion, how can we approach audience segmentation and targeting in the context of content marketing?

In today’s complex world of commerce, omni, and multi-touch points, marketing, and content marketing per se, are part of a very complicated matrix

However, to make it simple and start with the basics, we must identify the sweet spot of our audience demographics. A deep dive into this would also be to understand reach, affinity, and interest segments.

Once we understand the above, this can be married into the creation of personas. Personas are nothing but real-life iterations of consumers with similar characteristics, further giving us an insight into their lives in fashion and e-commerce, their styling inspirations, RTB (reasons to buy), and inspiration

Post that we understand the plethora of complex journeys available right from discovery to shopping which could happen online to offline, offline to online, and online only or offline only’

At each of these touchpoint journeys, the ask is to personalize communication catering to that persona at that stage of purchase, then leading to AB testing, conversion, and lastly Feedback taking to help improvise on the content strategy.

What content marketing tools and technologies are most valuable, and how should we leverage them for success?

There are a plethora of tools available in the market today AI is developing at such an explosive pace that tools are going to be able to generate new kinds of media and mimic human reasoning.

Some valuable tools include Grammarly for Spell checks and providing real-time direction and feedback

Jasper can be used as an AI content platform that uses machine learning to generate basic content about any given topic.

Atlabs helps take text and convert it into beautiful brand and contextual-led imagery

I can go on and on and trust me; this is just a scratch on the surface

What key performance indicators are used to measure the success of content marketing efforts, and how can we tie them back to overall business goals?

A very good question and this is a challenge we are trying to resolve at our end. There must be synergy between content marketing, data science, and tools. Some of the key matrices that we have put into place for our business include (and this is just a rough list, in no particular order)

• CTR on assets defined for the business on a daily, WTD, MTD, and YTD basis
• Impressions on the asset
• Conversions (direct or indirect) through the asset
• Pages per view through the asset
• For performance, retention, and social media marketing, we normally A/B test all our creative and content pieces

There are also tools like Crazy Egg and Hotjar which help you identify Hot and Cold Zones of which piece of asset is your consumer exactly interacting with across the funnel

How do business leaders determine the budget for a content marketing strategy, and how do they allocate resources effectively?

This is a tricky path to navigate since content marketing is a bread-and-butter requirement for all organizations. If a business is profitable, the ask for content marketing can be contextual, and innovative and can create disruption. However, if a business is still on a path to profitability, then the tenets of content marketing need to run the bare basic business machinery.

How do professionals stay updated on industry trends and emerging technologies in content marketing, and how do they incorporate new ideas into their strategy?

There are three ways in ways in which professionals can stay updated on trends.

• Experimentation with tools in everyday work.  As individuals in the workplace, we must try out and A/B test new platform techniques regularly. Little experiments give us a big breakthrough when least expected
• Attend networking events and seminars to understand new AI and ML tools.
• Read- read -read
• Upskill – there are plenty of courses on Udemy, upgrad, etc