Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Source: An Effective Content Marketing Strategy | Instant Lead Generation For Social Selling

Does your content marketing strategy find it challenging to create and publish content that engages with your target customers?

As digital becomes the dominant marketing channel, in order to increase brand exposure and have effective lead generation online then a strong content marketing strategy is required. Most social media plans are dependent on one factor, the creation and delivery of relevant, engaging content that will be of interest to your target audience.

Content marketing is a continuous process, and it is vital for professionals to monitor their efforts and adapt their strategy to the ever changing preferences and insights of their market.

Below are some greatly beneficial tips, explaining how to best implement your content marketing strategy

Gain Audience Insights
Knowledge is key, you need to research and discover where your target audience hang out online. Ask yourself; what conversations and topics do they contribute to? What type of content do they respond to? What topics grab their attention?
This can be done through competitor and market analysis; study your competitor posts, which topics have the most user responses? Analyze your own posts for insights into what style or content your target audience engage with most. Consider analyzing your audience through surveys and Google Analytic. This will enable you to target them directly, as you know their online behaviors and what platforms they use to share and interact with online.

Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Prior to the group brainstorming session, you must visualize the goals you want to achieve. Set out clear objectives to focus on, this will help the team work towards something collectively as they are all on the same page. For example; ‘Brand A seeks to provide delicious foods suitable for people with coeliac disease, to give them more choice and a varied diet. Isolating the factors in this statement can be done easily, for example – Your target audience would be people with coeliac disease, your content would be from recipes, and the coeliac society. Your main objective would be to provide people suffering from coeliac disease with more food options.

It is also important to plan and outline the type of content you will be creating:

• 40% recipes, advice, and interesting content to encourage user engagement
• 20% content curation from other sources
• 20% brand promotion (press release/mentions)
• 10% product focused ideas
• 10% promoting company culture, and recruiting of new talent

Content Research
The creation of relevant and engaging content necessitates research. Google Alerts can save you time, in that Google will notify you by email when it discovers fresh results on topics that you have flagged would be of interest to you. This tool detects current, real-time updates on web pages, blogs and articles. It can be used to keep track of trends, interesting topics and insights within your industry.

Google Alerts can also be used to tell you when your brand has been mentioned online, so you could respond to a customer review/query/complaint efficiently. This is an excellent avenue to remain current/up to date on the latest news stories, videos and topics. Enabling you to take inspiration from these findings to create relevant and current blog posts which you know will be of interest to your audience, as this is done in real-time.

Think Evergreen Content
The Evergreen process is slow and steady; results will be seen over time, rather than a surge in traffic due to a ‘trending’ topic. Evergreen content will not become obsolete any time soon; take ‘spin selling’ – this was a very popular topic ten to fifteen years ago, it was highly searched. Now very few people are talking about it, as this model has since been overtaken.

Entrepreneur Syed Balkhi states that Evergreen content is useful for long-term sustainability and is SEO friendly. It will theoretically drive traffic for years and will continue to be a popular search.
‘I like to write 20-30 evergreen titles that will rank well over time. They should reflect the style and tone of your target audience: If you’re catering to a market of entrepreneurs and creative professionals, they should be more informative, with an approachable yet cordial tone’.
Team members will know that the focus of their content should not be self-promoting; instead it should be informative and educational for their audience – focusing on solving their problems.

Choose Your Medium
Gather team members together for a brainstorming session, everyone will have different ideas and opinions, but the mission statement that you created earlier will keep everyone on track and focused on the same goal. Through team brainstorming exercises, you can define which medium should be used to communicate what content.

Blog posts are hugely beneficial for getting your point across, but explaining how to use computer software for example would be best suited to a demo video. Stats would be more engaging on an infographic rather than a long list of bullet points. This could also help in targeting more readers, through different platforms – you could use an infographic on Instagram with a link to the full article in the bio.

Content Consistency Is Key
Once you have defined your content strategy, create an editorial calendar. This will help you schedule posts, and articles. Your resources, such as your team and budget will determine the frequency of your content. Although it is inherent to be consistent with your content – posting three quality and relevant blog posts a week will get the attention of your audience. Your target is now accustomed to seeing your helpful and insightful content, and they know of the brand you represent. What happens if you become side-tracked by another task and post only one blog the next week? You will appear flaky and dis-interested to your target.

Having your calendar to reference will remind you that perhaps a blog post is due in two days. If you do not have time in your schedule, give your team the assignment of creating and sharing the blog. There needs to be a concrete plan of action set out, so blog posts and interactions are relevant, executed in real-time and followed up on accordingly.

Publish, Promote and Track Your Posts
While quality of content is paramount, there are still many other factors to consider. Keep in mind that posts should be relevant, engaging and informative. They should have an appropriate tone suited to the reader, in a B2C setting for example – be careful not to speak corporate and overload the customer with jargon. You must also be cautious of the grammar police, double check, even triple check your spelling and always ask a colleague to proof-read your post.

Enhancing your content for SEO purposes could improve your brand’s page ranking on Google. Study the analytics from your posts, this will guide you when creating new content, perhaps a certain topic or phrase is more popular than others. You can then create similar content or a modernized version, of how Social Selling has evolved in the past year.

Your bounce rate should also be considered, you must ask yourself why users read a post and do not navigate elsewhere on your site. What can you do to keep them on your site and looking around? Perhaps there is an increase in referral traffic from another site, why not interact and link with this website for a mutual benefit?

Be conscious of misleading headlines, you may get an influx of traffic to your site with a misleading headline, but once the user realizes the article is not relevant to the title, they will click back straight away. You should bear in mind that Google will penalize you based on your ‘click back’ rate.

Conclusion
While content marketing can be intimidating and does require resourcing, the sooner companies adopt this process the sooner results will flow. It is not only hugely beneficial in enhancing brand image, engaging with potential customers and increasing inbound traffic to your site but content marketing is now a core business activity.
Buyers and consumers want to engage with companies who demonstrate industry knowledge and insights. Evergreen content marketing also contributes heavily to building back links to your site, so it is imperative to have a joined up content marketing strategy in place to bring the pieces together.