Photo by Ingridarcher Ingrid Archer (Own work made by spotonvision) GFDL/ CC license via Wikimedia Commons
Are you sure about the effectiveness of your content? Businesses are beginning to realize the benefits of attractive online and offline content. The term content marketing is being thrown around a lot these days but most people do not know how to effectively market their published content.
Content marketing success is becoming more of a hit-and-miss technique as businesses have no expertise in creating good content and in marketing it.Just having good content doesn't cut it anymore. Hiring the services of a professional writing company is one way of ensuring the effective marketing of your content. They can deliver good content that can market itself. This will help the long-term growth of the organization by building the company brand. Content writers for businesses must keep these following tips in mind if they want their content to be successful.
1. Build Your Own Content Marketing Strategy – Follow these Steps
Figure out what you want to achieve with content marketing campaigns
This is the first step to creating a content marketing strategy. You need to understand this form of online marketing and spell out the goals and objectives. Instead of having vague goals like increasing sales, you need to have more specific goals like creating more tutorial type content for readers.
Who is your ideal audience?
After defining the goals of your content marketing strategy you need to figure out the demographics of your ideal audience. This way, there will be no confusion while creating and publishing content.
Create an editorial strategy
Most companies forget to do this but it is an essential step especially if you have many content writers. You need to decide the tone and style of all your content pieces and make sure that they are consistent. This will help you create a personality for your brand and will help customers connect with your brand more easily.
Process of content creation and publishing
This is a crucial step where you need to decide who will be creating content and how often. After this, your content marketing team needs to agree on the marketing channels for the content. Good content should be seen by as many people as possible, so make sure to include owned, earned and paid media in your content marketing strategy. Social networking platforms are probably the most cost effective content marketing channels so integrate your content and social media marketing strategies.
2. Divide and Rule
Instead of casting a wide net, divide your audience so that you can attract them with specific content. Keep in mind that you will be marketing to various kinds of people with different interests, personalities, etc. Customize your content to target each audience segment. Brand messages, content, company announcements and communications will have more of an impact if this approach is followed. This approach will also help you to make leads, connect with people, improve brand awareness, etc., which in turn will improve your business.
3. Maintain Consistency
Companies must monitor their content to make sure that it is in line with their message. Inconsistent content will drive away consumers and will pull down your entire marketing campaign. Your audience must have a clear idea about your brand, so make sure the content is persistent, consistent and not confusing.
4. Incorporation
The content marketing drive must be part of a company's overall marketing campaign. Proper integration of online and offline content marketing plans will boost brand awareness, brand loyalty and sales.
5. Focus
Businesses should set out clear goals for each piece of content that they publish. Knowing what you want to accomplish from your content will help focus your efforts and will reduce vague content that can have negative effects on a brand. Concentrate on the audience segments and focus on getting the most number of consumers from each segment.
6. Generate share-worthy content
Most importantly; your content must inspire people to share it with others. In the age of social networks, people are able to quickly share interesting and useful articles. Informative, engaging and relevant content should be generated to maximize its shareworthiness. Your audience members will share it with their friends and relatives who will in turn share it with their connections. Imagine the tremendous reach this kind of content can have.
7. Use thought-provoking images
Yes, content marketing usually evokes images of long form textual content in our mind but people now want more visual content. Video content, particularly, is in great demand but you can generate the same buzz and excitement around your brand by publishing images. They are easy to create but to truly stand above the rest they need to be exceptionally creative and thought provoking. One of the brands that is using extremely memorable, clever and lovable images to build its brand reputations is Oreo. The brand always uses simple but very witty imagery where its cookie features prominently with smart taglines that make their content go viral. Who can forget the rainbow colored Oreo cookie in support of LGBT rights?
8. Follow the example of publishers
Instead of thinking of about your content marketing team as a marketing division, think of it as a publishing division. Make sure you create and publish content that even journalists wish they had written. There is always room for original, interesting and unique textual content. Red Bull's approach of using targetted textual content, besides video diaries and live event tweets, has paid off well in retaining the attention of its customer base and establishing itself as a hip brand. Red Bull publishes a magazine Red Bulletin and has a whole website dedicated just to the content its publishing department generates without any promotional material whatsoever about the brand. This has worked so well for the brand that now Red Bull has become synonymous with extreme adventure sports.
9. Promote user generated content
Most brands make the big mistake of thinking that all their content must be created in-house or by content marketing firms that they have hired. However, if you want your brand to connect with customers more deeply and to increase engagement with them, one of the best ways to do so is to ask users to create content for you. Kraft Foods started content marketing before its competitors even realized that having a website was essential. Kraft customers submit recipes and food related articles, and the website consists of almost entirely user generated content that is extremely popular among customers.
10. Consider different types of content
When you start content marketing to build brand awareness, don’t just stick to one type of content. Make sure you have something for everyone and every channel of content marketing – if not all at least most of them. SlideShare presentations, Pinterest boards and pins, podcasts, webinars, etc. are just some of the popular types of content that brands tend to overlook.
Types of content you can create
Step #4 gives a list of many types of content that you need to publish on a regular basis for content marketing success. However, starting off with content marketing can be difficult. So I'm sharing a list below of the type of content you cannot do without.
• Blog posts
• Facebook and Twitter Content
• Videos, Graphics/Images and other Multimedia content
• eBooks
You may think that you do not have the time or resources to create all these types of content but this is not true. The more content you create, the easier content marketing gets. So when you have a substantial number of blog posts and lists, you can transform them into an eBooks. Or after a webinar, you can transcribe that content in a white paper.