So you thought creating content was tough? Welcome to the world of content marketing, where there’s literally no end to the amount of advice you can absorb! At the end of the day, however, you need to keep your basics strong. Content marketing is a dynamic field, with a lot happening every day. New content formats, shifting trends in popularity and success of content marketing platforms, and availability of intelligent analytics and content marketing management tools –you get the idea. In this guide, we will try to help you make you sense of everything. Here are 10 ways you can adopt to make your content marketing more organized, well planned, and highly targeted.
Have a Detailed Plan in Place
Sounds obvious enough? It’s surprising how only a very few content marketers have a tangible plan to help then organize their efforts. A content marketing plan is not only about broadly identifying the platforms you’ll target to promote your content.
Sounds obvious enough? It’s surprising how only a very few content marketers have a tangible plan to help then organize their efforts. A content marketing plan is not only about broadly identifying the platforms you’ll target to promote your content.
To whatever extent possible, enumerate your desired outcomes, for instance, the number of newsletter subscriptions you want in a month/quarter, etc. Research, read, experiment, and keep on updating your content marketing plan to stay in control and ahead of the game.
Choose A Suitable Format For Your Content
Arguably, the biggest mistake committed by content marketers is to fixate on one or two content formats, and hope for things to work out. Ask yourself – is a blog post format the best option for the content you want to create? Here are a few tips that you can use:
- Be open to the idea of creating content in new formats.
- If you have a lot of stats and facts to communicate, consider a visually appealing medium, such as an infographic.
- Consider the option of creating an eBook by collating and arranging related previous blog posts.
- Throw in a video interview with an expert every now and then; it even gives you content to market on YouTube.
- If you’re going to explain a procedure to your audience, a walkthrough or how-to guide is the best format.
- There are many often neglected but powerful formats that you can market in special portals (example, presentations on SlideShare.com), such as white papers, guides, videos, quizzes, podcasts, and checklists; experiment with them.
Keep Your Content High on Value Density
So many times, content creators and marketers get consumed in the run of the mill, and lose contact with the core idea behind content marketing – promoting highly valuable content. To do that, your content must have high value density. Think of it as the quantity of meaningful information/entertainment value it offers, divided by the amount it will take the audience to consume it. Some tips to remember:
- Write numbered goals about the content’s quality and value before you create your content, and ensure they’re met before you share it with audiences.
- Give your content a couple of reads/checks to weed out all clichés and jargon; nothing puts off audiences like these mistakes.
- Remove every redundant message in your proofreading and reviews.
- Ask yourself – is there anything that I could have kept simpler?
Make Your Content Rick on Research and Engagement Quotient
The days when a grammatically correct blog post, stating your opinion on a subject, would do pretty well are a matter of the past. Today, audiences are picky about the content they consume, subscribe to, or share. To make sure your web content inspires readers to share, like, comment, or discuss online, follow these tips:
- Include citations and references to underscore the amount of research you conducted to create the content.
- Include links to highly value adding web resources to help your readers get something meaningful out of your content.
- Include your experiences and real stories in the content to strike an emotional bond with audiences, and to engage their interest.
Identify The Most Valuable Audience Groups
Take it from us, your potential audience will always comprise of several small groups, remarkable different from each other, even if they all fit in the same category in terms of broad indicators such as demographics. So, you’ve got to invest your content marketing efforts in the right channels, targeting content to audiences most suitable for it.
For starters, you’d invariably need to begin with your intuition, and then use tools such as Google Analytics to validate your understanding of your target audience groups. Thankfully, you will be get inexpensive (or free) analyses tools for most platforms, such as Facebook Insights, to help you understand your target audiences better.
Use your insight about the different user groups you can market to in order to create finely tuned content for specific audiences, and to get the most out of your content marketing investments of time, money, and effort.
The Power of Right Placement and Right Timing
So you’ve created the most amazing content post – that’s great. Now, to get the maximum marketing juice from the content, you have to know:
Where to promote it
Be prepared to research, and you will come to know of the best platforms to leverage for sharing specific types of content and getting the maximum exposure. For instance, a ‘top 10’ list would do well on social media posts, and an eBook will do well when promoted via email marketing. The right platform will magnify your content’s exposure and appeal.
When to post it
Your intuition will suggest to you that most Facebook users would check their timelines during the late evening hours of the Friday. However, peak and lean times on social media, for instance, are more complex. Thankfully, there are freely available analyses that help you develop insight on the most suitable times when audiences are active and in the mood to consume new content. Get the timing right, and your content will find exposure to a lot more eyeballs than otherwise.
Experiment to Understand Your Audience’s Preferences, and Marketing Effectiveness
Highly targeted and fine tuned content marketing campaigns are much more successful than ones that are based mostly on intuition and past experience. With so many easy to use analytics tools at your disposal, it’s almost necessary that you invest time and effort towards understanding which audiences like what kind of content, which platform works best for specific content formats, and how frequently you need to post to remain in the audience’s mind space.
Market Content as a Product
The more you think of your content as a product, better and more focused your content marketing efforts will become. Just like with a product, you will need to take several factors into account as you market your content. Right from understanding what your competitor is doing to understanding that your audience will need something fresh every time, from proactively looking for feedback for content improvement, and measuring content marketing KPIs, you’ll need to manage quite a few activities in parallel to make things work.
Understand What The Best Are Doing, and Emulate Them
Why reinvent the wheel when you’ve got one rolling perfectly! To some extent, you can take a cue from this, and see what other successful content marketers are doing. Use tools like FollowerWonk (Twitter Bio search), AllTop (blog search), Buffer, and HootSuite to find out the most influential content marketers. Next, subscribe to their blog newsletters and follow them on social media. Analyze their marketing ploys, and identify the unique elements. Then, map these unique marketing tactics on to your content marketing strategy, and adopt whatever you can.
Blogger Outreach
Blogging is, in many ways, a community. The more value you add to the community as a whole, the more value, exposure, marketing leverage you’ll receive. Blogger outreach is a good starting point. Spend some time going through the last month’s posts for top 5 blogs from your area of interest. Now, identify a few posts where you can add some valuable comments that could initiate discussions. Once you see some activity on your comments, look to include a link to a relevant blog post from your blog as a substantiation of your opinion. Slowly, your network will expand, and you will always have fellow blogger’s websites to include in your marketing channel mix.
Final Thoughts
Writing terrific content, in most cases, is the starting point of getting success with your websites and blogs. You need to back it up with terrific content marketing as well. From creating a stellar content marketing plan to measuring the most important KPIs and fine tuning your plan accordingly, from social media marketing for your content to blogger outreach – there are several time tested and proven effective best practices and methods that you can trust. We’ve covered 10 of them in this guide; try them out.
