It’s well into 2015, the year of content marketing. Every marketer has been trying to increase sales with branded content. What exactly is content marketing? It’s basically branded business storytelling. It’s sharing your professional, company and employee stories with your audience to cultivate a client relationship. People tend to trust brands more when they are humanized. Here are three tips to creating your own content marketing strategy:

Do your research—Complete a comprehensive analysis into your audience, trends, media and competition. These areas will address the “who, what, where, and why” of your content marketing. Next, a strategy will naturally evolve from the research.

Tell a story—Your audience wants to see the human side of your company. They’re interested in the values and employees of your company. A story engages the emotional side of your audience and captures their attention.

Create a conversation—After you have published your story or stories and captivated your audience, it’s important to keep up that humanizing factor by allowing your audience to comment on your blog articles and social media posts. More importantly, respond to them in a colloquial (but not slang) manner, to show them you care about cultivating a client relationship.