Keys to Great Content Marketing

You’ve probably figured out from your dismal analytics by now that content marketing requires a lot more than the occasional blog post to get results.

Sure you can go viral with the right blog post, but are you create viral content every time you publish? That’s highly unlikely.

Even if your content doesn’t go viral every time, you need to publish every piece as if it would. That means being at the top of your game each time you create content and having a clear strategy for what you want to achieve.

Here are a few things you can do to ensure you have a great content marketing strategy – not just one that meets the basics:

Create Customer Personas

Who are you writing for?

Your customer, right? But which customer?

Audience research gives you an overall understanding of the customers you are trying to target, but when you are writing content, you need to think about individuals and not your entire demo.

You need to create customer personas to target when writing your content. These personas should be as detailed as possible so that you know the wants, needs and problems of these imaginary customers. You can then make your content as detailed as possible in return, which will create a stronger connection with readers.

Build on Your Brand

Now how well do you know your brand?

Every piece of writing you create will have a “voice,” and it should reflect your own brand persona. If you haven’t defined your brand persona well enough, you won’t have a strong voice.

Every blog post, every social media update, and every email you send should have that voice and should build on your overall branding strategy. Your content should reflect your company’s values, your mission, and your personality. People should have a sense of who wrote the content without even seeing your byline.

That consistency in branding will build customer trust and loyalty over time so that any content you publish will have more impact.

Create a Schedule

Knowing when you will publish will help you plan your posts better.

You won’t look at your blog, think “I haven’t published in a month so I should get something up,” and then scramble to write whatever comes to mind by the end of the day.

Instead, you can create space for short- and long-term posts. You’ll be able to cover news and trending topics, and then you’ll be able to spend time working on more in-depth research or longer content.

You won’t be spending precious mental energy on when to create; you can better plan your time and be a more effective writer instead.

Revisit Your Strategy Regularly

The best content marketing teams meet weekly to discuss their publication strategy and to make tweaks as necessary.

That might mean modifying the publication schedule, or it might mean discussing different topics to cover.

Your team should review what types of content have been working well, including length, topic, format and so on. You should also review what days and times have proven best for publication, what headline strategies get the most clicks, what photos or videos attract the most attention, and so on.

Having these meetings also means maintaining some flexibility. If you become too committed to your strategy, you won’t be able to make the needed changes when your analytics show that it isn’t getting the results you want.

Publish Across Channels

Something you publish on your blog might not perform as well as the same content published on Facebook. Or vice versa.

The success of your content has to do with more than the words themselves. It also includes the time and place where you publish. If your content strategy has not been successful, it may be because you are not matching up the right content with the right channels.

Create content for different channels and in different mediums to see what gets the best results.

For example, you might create a wonderful blog post, but instead of just sharing a link on social media, you create a video that you share on Facebook, an infographic that you share on Pinterest, and a title photo that you send out on Instagram.

You will have to conduct extensive testing to find out what strategies work best for the different channels.

When you use the right content recommendation tools and you follow these other tips to develop the right marketing strategy, you will get much more out of your content. You may not go viral every time, but you will start getting the traffic and the conversions you want.

Source: B2C