Content Marketing: 5 Tips to Optimize Your Efforts
By Mia Taylor
Successful content marketing should do three things: attract, engage and convert prospects.
Ideally, it turns prospects into customers, and if all goes well it turns them into very happy, repeat customers.
Creating a successful content marketing plan that achieves all of those goals however is no small task.
As a recent article in The Business Journals (How to be Engaging with Content Marketing) noted, websites and blogs play a giant role in such efforts thanks to the Internet and its ability to bring prospects right to you.
But getting them there is where your thoughtfully created content marketing plan comes in.
1. Content Marketing is a Process
One of the ideas I liked most in that Business Journal article was the notion that content marketing is not a single event. It’s a process.
And that process involves many layers including researching your target audience, developing a content calendar aligned with your strategic goals, creating compelling content to address those goals, posting the content on appropriate channels and then gathering data regarding your successes and failures and moving forward based on that insight.
Content marketing is a far more thoughtful and complex process then simply posting blogs on an occasional or random basis and sharing them on social media.
2. Ask Yourself These Questions
That same Business Journal article raised a variety of excellent questions that are great way to really begin honing in on what’s working and what isn’t working with your current efforts. Among the questions raised:
What is the goal of your best content marketing assets (i.e. website, blog)
What do your prospects see on your website, blog and landing pages?
What do you want your prospects to do when they see content that’s engaging and relevant?
What do they actually see, think and do?
Sit down and really “audit” your current efforts. Be honest with yourself. Even downright brutal if need be. And then get ready to develop a path forward that corrects the issues you’ve identified and capitalizes on the successes.
3. Great Content Marketing Requires Creativity
The most successful content marketing efforts are those that are truly creative. But not all of us have a team of creative professionals we can call upon to develop buzzworthy campaigns for us.
In lieu of that, start by studying the competition and successful examples of great content marketing. Identify what they’re doing well. And get inspired to do something engaging and memorable yourself.
A few years ago Marketing Land assembled a collection of some of the most powerful and successful content marketing campaigns. The examples were from such names as Coke, Buffer, Hootsuite and more. And each example provided a takeaway about what made each campaign successful.
Successful content marketing efforts often include personalization, emotional connection, informing and engaging (potential) customers and creating stellar content, including visual content, which is increasingly popular and compelling. Oh and have fun too.
4. A Content Calendar is Key
In the same way that magazines and newspapers maintain editorial calendars plotting out the stories will run when, having a content calendar is a key part of successful content planning.
This calendar should be detailed and identify what you will be posting to your website over the course of the coming month, three months, even six months. Identify specific dates when you plan to post items. The posting schedule shouldn’t be limited to just your blog, it can and should also cover proposed email updates or social media campaigns or landing page updates.
Posting with regularity is key so that your audience knows when to visit the website for fresh material. A content calendar will help tremendously with this effort. It will keep you on track and allow you to
5. Review and Measure Results and Adapt Accordingly
Analysis of your efforts once you’ve set them in motion is of vital importance. It will help you gain clarity regarding what’s working and what’s not working. For instance, you can use Google analytics or some other tool to figure out who is coming to your site, how long they’re spending there, what pieces of content they are engaging in and more. Facebook also has audience measurement tools. These are just a few examples.
Of course there are many opinions out there about what it takes be successful with a content marketing plan. But this overview will get you started on the right path, a much more organized and thoughtful path. Stay tuned for our next post about effective content creation, which will dive further into the nuts and bolts of writing and posting content.
Sources for this blog:
https://marketingland.com/content-marketing-done-right-8-examples-can-learn-149088
