These days, content marketing isn’t just a nice to have, it’s an essential part of any successful marketing campaign.
According to eMarketer, 84.5% of US companies with at least 100 employees will use digital content marketing strategies in 2019.
According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 81% of businesses who document their content marketing strategy align their teams around a common mission statement and goals. An additional 81% said that recording their strategy makes it easier to develop and produce content.
Creating a strategic content marketing plan takes time, but when done well, not only will content creation be easier, you’ll achieve your goals faster!
Use these 7 tips to develop an effective content strategy:
- Expertise creates authenticity
Authenticity is key when it comes to content. It’s time to change your content if it doesn’t reflect your brand’s personality or the value you provide.
Companies that fail to be authentic – in all aspects of their business – will eventually fail. You will lose the trust of potential clients and customers if you fill your marketing materials with fluff.
Provide value by educating or engaging your prospects with your content. By doing so, you will build trust and credibility with potential customers.
Authenticity can be incorporated into your brand in the following ways:
- Make sure your content aligns with the mission of your company
- Put your brand’s personality into your writing without using industry jargon
- Build trust with your audience by engaging with them
- Don’t just write for search engines, but for people as well
- Ask subject matter experts within your organization to write about topics they are familiar with
- Become more collaborative
Collaboration is on the rise in content marketing. Businesses are partnering up to utilize backlinks, showcase their subject matter experts, and reach a broader audience.
Companies benefit when they excel at leveraging collaboration. In order to reach and engage audiences, they provide well-informed content with a variety of responses from industry experts.
When collaborating, it’s important to choose the right company to partner with. Consider partnering with brands that offer complementary products or services, or that target the same audience, but aren’t necessarily your competitors. Your audience will grow as a result of those partnerships. This article from HubSpot illustrates how partnering with the right company can be successful for your business by showcasing well-known, co-branding partnerships. Increase collaboration through guest blogs, social media takeovers, and interviews.
- Create relevant content
To gain potential customers’ attention and establish trust, marketers must create high-quality, relevant content. You will have a hard time converting visitors into leads if your content is not relevant to your target audience.
It can be challenging to keep your audience’s attention in a world full of content. By creating useful content for your visitors, you will improve your chances of building brand awareness and moving potential customers along the buyer’s journey.
Keep your persona’s preferences, behaviors, and pain points in mind when creating content. By creating content that answers their questions, you will be able to address their concerns. It will help you differentiate your brand, engage your audience, and increase prospects’ and customers’ trust.
Lastly, when creating content, consider where your reader is in the buyer’s journey. If someone is unfamiliar with your brand, you should produce significantly different content than if they have engaged with it several times in the past.
- Use multimedia content
It is clear that multimedia is the future of content, and it won’t disappear any time soon. The US alone consumes almost 75 million videos each day.
Engage your audience by using interactive text, audio, video and animations instead of still images.
Use of video is one of the most common ways to incorporate multimedia into your content strategy. However, audio content is also becoming increasingly popular. Podcasts are a good example. More than 6 million Americans listen to podcasts on a weekly basis, and 40% listen to more than one podcast.
Use audio and video in your content marketing by:
- Using video marketing in blogs, on your website, and on social media. Start small with simple FAQ videos, live videos, and social media stories to get branded video content out there.
- Adding multimedia to your content is easy when you create a podcast that teaches listeners about topics within your industry. Slack, a communication software company, offers podcasts on communication and collaboration, while Neil Patel and Eric Siu, marketing experts, offer short podcasts for marketers. In neither case do they try to sell listeners on their products, but rather provide valuable information so that when listeners are ready to buy, their brands are at the top of their minds.
- Make the most of micro-moments
Consumers today want fast, easy-to-digest information. In order to meet this need, content marketing must create “micro-moments” – Google’s term for four “moments” when a person wants to know, go, do, or buy.
- Know: People who are researching, but not yet ready to purchase
- Go: Those who are considering buying a local product or service
- Do: Those who need assistance completing a task
- Buy: Those who are interested in buying
To help guide potential customers to the information they need, marketers are now developing “knowledge bases” and other informational resources.
Create FAQ pages, build knowledge bases, use Stories on Instagram and Facebook, and create snippet information for search engines to add micro-moments to your content strategy.
Ensure that these pieces are short and easy to understand. Give your potential customer an answer in under 30 seconds so that they can continue their purchasing process.
- Think strategically about your content
Content creation is an essential part of marketing strategies. In order to set yourself up for success, you can start with your overall business goals and work backwards to determine appropriate content creation goals.
Goals include:
- Lead generation
- Traffic increase on the web
- Developing thought leadership
- Increasing your brand’s social media following
Your content should be informed by your company’s goals.
When creating content, you should also consider:
- Algorithms for crawling the web for SEO
- Content creation for long-form and short-form
- Multichannel distribution of content to create an omnichannel experience
Keep your content and messaging consistent across all channels. Provide a better overall brand experience by aligning your messaging, goals, and design with your target audience’s preferences and behaviors. As a result, the buyer journey is improved and revenue is increased.
- Today, content marketing is marketing
We must consider how content marketing has evolved into just marketing when considering how much it has grown in recent years.
Content creation used to be seen as a side project by marketers, but now it’s a central component of all successful marketing campaigns.
Companies use content to communicate directly with their target audiences. Conversions are boosted by creating brand recognition, generating qualified leads, building trust, and increasing traffic.
Content marketing is today’s marketing. In order to succeed in marketing, you must understand the importance of content creation.
Conclusion
Content will continue to evolve, and brands will need to refine their strategies to remain competitive. Businesses can succeed by adapting to relevant industry trends, such as those outlined above.
