All marketing professionals or aspiring ones will agree that there are no quick fixes or magical formula to implement marketing. Marketing success lies in implementing a good strategy involving traditional, digital and social media tactics.
While many marketing trends and strategy will come and go one marketing trend will stay for years to come and that is content marketing. As per Content Marketing Institute, content marketing brings six times higher conversion rates than other methods. Content Marketing is much more than a blog post and sharing on social media.
Presented below are some of the Content Marketing Tips to stay ahead of your competitors.
Have a Clear Purpose of Content Marketing:
A common mistake in content marketing is to have a confused purpose of the content. Content Marketing is about creating and sharing relevant and useful content without promoting the brand explicitly.
The end result is to arouse interest in the brand and create potential leads which in turn will increase sales but the focus of content marketing should be to create interesting, engaging and entertaining content. It should not look like an advertisement or advertorial. Content marketing is about guiding the customers through the buying cycle. A well-done content marketing is ‘selling without selling’.
Include different types of Content Format:
Create content for different points of the buyer’s journey or sales funnel. Content should drive the reader towards purchase.
Different types of content will work differently depending on what stage of the buying cycle is your customer. Different content formats also provide variety for your audience.
It is found that on average marketers use eight different content formats like social media posts, blogs, and articles, email marketing, visual media, videos, whitepapers, e-books, podcasts, webinar, infographics and landing page.
Create Original Content:
Focus on creating an original content. Create your own content with your own resources or in partnership with a like-minded organization. The partnership can help in increasing the reach and share the workload and cost.
Creating New Content:
One of the challenges posed by content marketers is generating new content. How can one continuously create new and engaging content unless and until one is running some generic site where you can post about any topic.
When you belong to specific industry you have a certain range of topics. One of the ways is to create content around the news in your industry. Other sets of tips are content curation, brainstorming ideas with your friends, peers, blogger friends, ask your readers what they would like to read, interview someone and you can create a blog post on it, invite guest writers, review something, share your success and failures.
Be an Effective Content Creator:
To be an effective content creator one needs to be updated about all the happenings in the industry to which one belongs to. Say you belong to banking industry knowing about the different types of products, all banks and customers to which they cater to is important but it is equally important to be updated with latest developments and innovations and what are the opportunities and threats. The more you know more you will be able to create content and hopefully solve problems or provide solutions to your audience.
Understand your audience completely. Breathe, sleep, eat, think like your audience, understand them completely which you can use to address their concerns via content.
Improve your skills by avoiding common mistakes like overwriting, awkward phrasings, paragraphs that don’t go with the flow.
Generate more and more content. The more content you produce the more are the chances of generating traffic to your website.
Give examples while writing as people are able to relate better with examples. Don’t talk only about yourself, talk about your customers, prospects, competitors, industry etc.
Distribute and Automate:
Once great content is created it needs to be distributed and automated. It doesn’t matter what type of content is created i.e. Whitepapers, blogs, podcast, e-books all can be distributed through social media and further through email.
Content distribution can be scheduled as per time using a social media management platform like MavSocial.
Leverage and Future-Proof your Content:
Revisit your existing content and make the most of it. Can you make some changes here and there to reuse it or repost on social media? Repeating social media posts helps in increasing reach, engagement, traffic, leads and sales.
Create future-proof / evergreen content which can give long-term opportunities to reach your audience. Once you have created evergreen content it can be reposted on social media for maximum reach.
This can be done with MavRepeater, where a campaign can be created, fill posts and specify time slots. You can create repeat cycles based on the target audience and choose the social media.
Last but not the least monitor / track your content marketing strategy. Figure out the reach and engagement, what has worked well and what has not, fix the gaps and make improvements.
