12 time saving strategies for a successful content marketing campaign

12 time saving strategies for a successful content marketing campaign

18th October 2017

What is content marketing?

If put up to the point, content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating and sharing valuable, reliable, relevant and consistent content to attract an audience and ultimately promote a company or an individual in the virtual world. But creating the content is basically half the work.

For an effective content marketing strategy, you can’t create any old, low quality content which would actually jeopardize the image of your brand/company name. Instead, you will have to put up valuable content relevant to the customers you aim to attract.

That is why you need a clear strategy, and unless you have one, you won’t be able to produce the right type of content, which in the end won’t get you your desired traffic, audience or sales leads.

Why is content marketing important?

Traditional forms of marketing like an advertisement, email are becoming less effective day by day. Most people often consider email marketing as spam. Content marketing, on the other hand, relies on creating relevant and helpful contents that assist probable customers in learning new things and solving their queries regarding the topic. Customers appreciate the great content and if a company can establish itself as an important and helpful content provider, it would be rewarded with more business and sales leads in the end.

What should a content marketing strategy include?

Content marketing strategy basically sketches out an outline to a business and customer needs. It also helps in letting you plan on how you will use your content in future without having to sweat about it at the last moment. There are no definitive formats for building a content marketing strategy since each one will be unique to the business that creates it, but there are some basic components that they commonly include, and they are as follows:

1. Setting up your goals

If you are new to the content marketing concept, the first thing you need to know is clearly able to define your content marketing goals. Are you seeking new customers? Are you trying to promote your services?  Are you trying to make a name for yourself in the social world? Increase brand value over the globe? Regardless what your goal is, you need to pave your way properly in order to ultimately attain your goal. As you start working through content marketing, ask yourself if your content will support reach your goals. If it doesn’t, focus your resources on content that will.

2. Start a content calendar

Developing a content calendar helps you stay onto your content publishing activity and ensures that posts are published on regular basis and on time. It also helps you keep track of what you have published and how you may synchronize the list later on.

3. Make keyword research

Conducting key words research through Google AdWords is a very important part of creating great content. By knowing which keywords are searched often, you can create more specific content that suits your audience, and it is also easier for search engines to discover and rank.

4. Develop a target persona

A target persona is important when it comes to knowing whom you are marketing to. It is tough to create a great content without having a specific customer in mind. Creating a target persona is a helpful way to understand exactly whom you are talking to.

5. Work on trending topics

Keeping your content relevant means staying alongside the latest trends, and also acting on them. Search what people mostly look for, what they ask around the most, what they find interest in knowing. You can narrow down to latest newsfeeds to know what might keep your audiences buzzed up lately. Relate the top news to other materials that might connect in future.

6. Thorough research before you start writing

Research your topic of content properly before getting down to write on it. Research gives you a widespan view of the content that you are currently focusing on, and also an idea on how frequently people still search and read such content. Your research must also include studying your business competitors, understanding the current market situation and creating the ability to understand your customers’ query.

Invest in creating contents that your customers demand, rather than something that you feel the readers want. Instead of defining your customers how good your service is, compel them to come try your service by helping them find the best solution to their problem. This helps build the initial foundation of trust between a business entity and its customers.

7. Open up to Social media sites

Social media accounts are important in content marketing. It helps the business to establish a presence on the internet more than anything else. Social webpages like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the top most spoken of. Other than posting your contents under relevant blogs or webpages, you can post your contents on your social pages and keep them sharing it every now and then.

8. Focus on effective content writing

Although there is no recipe to write high quality content, you can always look back to the following to improve the quality and quantity of your written material:

a) A head turning title: Because nothing beats a better headline in compelling a reader to continue going through your material.
b) A short description to follow: A short summarization of your writing to come beneath your title. The more relevant and up to the point it is to the headline, the more audience it attracts.
c) Don’t repeat keywords: So just because you are writing a content about pancakes, doesn’t mean you will repeat the word pancake 30 times in a content 600 words in length. Try alternating words with similar meaning. This enhances your post, making it look more interesting to read.
d) Use references and hyperlinks: If you are quoting from other websites or blogs, make sure you put down the name of the original content creator or hyperlink the webpage where you got it from. It is just a good internet etiquette, and customers would definitely appreciate the honesty.

9. Apply illustrated content

Visual content is engaging, and effective as it helps the readers to process, comprehend and possess more information rapidly. Different audiences prefer content in different visual forms. Adding slides, GIFs, infographs, screenshots, and short videos to the content help reach more audience since it serves two ways; by making the content look more attractive and making it easier for the reader to understand in a short time.

10. Proper content promotion

Even with a greatly written content, it would be impossible to reach your ultimate goal in publishing it without proper promotion. It takes more than simply publishing the post to have your content be visible and read or shared by the right audience. Using the correct variation of keywords from the content, the post can be shared into different websites. Submitting the content to communities with a huge number of readers can boost your audience reach, like for instance sharing your content at Reddit, TMZ, and The Huffington Post etc.

11. Listen to your audience

Once you have begun creating and posting contents online, you will start getting audience feedback. This can help you determine what they like, what they don’t, and what they want in future. Their feedback can also help you get an insight of what you need to work on and how you can improve you future contents. By listening to everything the audience has to say, you can get new ideas for your future contents, and thus assure traffic from your target audience.

12. Measure the output

At the end of all, evaluate how much closer your content and your pre and post actions have brought you to your goals. This way you would know if your process and standards are actually benefitting you. Track the number of people engaging your content, see how often the post has been shared in the social media webpages. The numbers not only bring you closer to your goals but help you decide what to do and what not to do in your next project.

Keeping your content marketing strategy updated

Most sections of your marketing strategy should remain the same as your content marketing program evolves. Your ethics and business goals should likely remain the same, however, other aspects of your strategy will benefit from being reviewed and updated time to time. To ensure the quality of your content marketing program, improvise on how well the information is collected and processed, and how well your team interacts with customers with the feedback from your content.

Finally, keep in mind that to know your industry and your customers, and to know how to deal with their problems with the best possible solution are the prime parts of online content marketing. Being consistent and evolving with the best of services each time will pave your way to success, eventually. As the Chinese proverb goes, ‘The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step’, make sure you tread along the right steps.

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