15 Jun Transform your content marketing campaign
If your idea of content marketing entails dropping the occasional blog post online and hoping it makes a splash, you may need to rethink your strategy. Taking your content-marketing campaign from good to great means always being on your A-game, focusing with laser-like precision on your target audience and constantly refining your methods until you find the perfect combination of strategy and tactics that helps you achieve your goals. Content marketing is a way to produce what people want (interesting, useful content) instead of producing what they ignore (pushy, arrogant, or clumsy advertising). It also shows (rather than tells) potential customers that you’re the right choice to solve their problems.
Good content is inherently worth reading, listening to, or watching. It delivers an enjoyable experience for the audience. It’s entertaining. It might make the audience laugh, or cry, or stand up in righteous outrage, but it must move them in some meaningful way. The smart content marketer thinks in terms of an audience, rather than “prospects” or “leads.”
First, pay attention to customer role in content marketing.
Overall, you absolutely must pay attention to audience profiles, also called customer roles. Sound marketing strategies always begin with customers’ needs, an important element in content-marketing campaigns. Without a well-developed customer role, your content will settle at “good” when it should be “great.”
So, just what is a customer role? It’s a comprehensive and detailed picture of an imaginary target customer. The Content Marketing Institute provides a round-up of resources to help you develop insightful profiles to refine your content-marketing strategy. They’re worth checking out before you proceed with your own content marketing plan. Once you’ve got your customer role squared away, you’re ready for those five tips to great original content.
1. Meet weekly with your team.
Great content marketing is often shared content. Many people think of creativity as something that happens in isolation, but often complementary talents on a team can build something bigger and better than can its individual talents. Meeting weekly enhances creativity, forges connections and improves content marketing for many companies.
2. Build on your brand strategy.
The best content is built on an existing brand strategy. Know what your brand stands for and what values it represents to your target customer. Any content created for your campaigns should reflect core brand values so deeply that, at first glance, your customers know immediately that the content is yours. Every touch point, every connection should enhance brand value to build loyalty among your customers.
3. Stick to a schedule.
This sounds so basic, but few people do it! Make a schedule . . . and stick to it. Content marketing is more effective when you regularly engage with your audience. Customers begin to look forward to your content, and this hope increases engagement, which is the golden rule for great content.
Develop your own content schedule and follow it without fail. Use scheduling tools like HootSuite and others to drip messages into your social media channels. Release new content on predictable basis. The more routine you build into your content marketing campaigns, the better the engagement.
4. Confront the brutal facts.
Being honest with yourself may be challenging for you. In order to make your content marketing strategy a success, you need to face the facts. Even if you think a content piece you’ve created rocks, your target audience may not find it useful at all.
Don’t let that get you down, though. Being honest not only helps you come up with better content ideas, but honesty will also help save you time. If you blindly create content and share it without thinking about its effectiveness, you only waste your time and energy on something that won’t work for your vision.
Be honest with your situation right now. Do you have content ready? Do you know exactly what you want to do for your content marketing? Do you have content created by other people you’ve hired, but it’s not any good? Know where you’re at with content marketing, and figure out what you need to do to move forward.
If you’re stuck, ask yourself these two questions:
- Would I share this content with my customers?
- Would they think it was a useful piece?.
5. Use different mediums.
When you hear “content,” you probably imagine written material such as blog posts, white papers, case studies, free eBook’s and so on. Perhaps you’ve added “video” as an afterthought. But here’s another idea to consider: Broaden your content-marketing spectrum by using different mediums.
Different people prefer to receive materials in varying formats. Some auditory learners prefer podcasts, while visual learners may prefer reading about a topic or watching a video. Still others like tip sheets, checklists, and workbooks or learning by doing. Shake up your content marketing by using different mediums to engage different learning styles among your audience. Audience will be good
6. Take risks.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” This old saying applies as much to content marketing as it does to other things in life.
The great leaders, thinkers and artists of the world are risk-takers. Beethoven took a big risk when he completely changed the form of the symphony from the tried and true Classical period symphony with its scripted movements, orchestrations and expectations. Steve Jobs changed how we view personal computers by focusing on what his company, Apple, did best, and encouraging his teams to think that way, too. Others throughout history have excelled because they decided to take a risk and move in a different direction from the herd.
But doesn’t stay lock in a self-imposed box forever. Break free and try new things to truly set your work apart from the rest. If your competitors are all blogging, try micro blogging or long-form copy to stand out. If others say Instagram is the way to go, choose Twitter. Experiment and monitor your successes. Learn from what works and what doesn’t.
With these tips and the basics of content marketing under your belt, you’ll be well on your way to harnessing this promising marketing method. But, don’t stop there. Continue to educate yourself, try new ideas and keep one foot in front of the other.
7. Be consistent and disciplined with content marketing.
What’s the key to content marketing success? It’s consistency. If you want to achieve your goals with content marketing, you need to be consistent. You need to have a schedule that supports a consistent content marketing strategy.
Even if you have a ton of great content ideas lined up and ready to go, you still need to continue publishing valuable content for your target market. There are no shortcuts, you (or someone on your team) just has to do it.
Conclusion
So what do you need to do now? Have a BHAG – big, hairy, audacious goal. Get organized, and develop your content marketing plan around that goal. Follow the seven steps for good-to-great to enhance your plan.. Take time to plan tactics you want to implement in your content marketing strategy and what you need to do to make your vision become reality. Lastly, aim to influence!