Content Marketing is a crucial element in generating brand awareness. While organizations can spend endless time on SEO techniques, content guides, target audience’s preferences and promotional schemes, one simple principle remains supremely important: the content needs to be brand new, unique and informative and angled to the interests of the target audience to get maximum acclaim.
Not surprisingly, real effective content marketing strategies will continue to change, dictated by your understanding of the target audience. For a beginner embarking on the long road of content marketing, the journey could seem daunting at first, but if the milestones are set beforehand, it could easily turn into a cakewalk. Read on to do just that.
1 Identifying Your Target Audience For Effective Content Marketing
If you don’t know the next thing about your audience, then you shouldn’t even bother with content marketing. The very definition of effective content marketing has the connotation of “marketing to a specific set audience”. You’ve got to have someone to whom you could sell your idea. But if you believe your idea will find its audience on its own, then you might be a bit fanciful in your perception.
And that job’s just got easier than ever before. Nowadays you have every bit of detail about your competitor’s strategies available to you, in many cases, well in advance; it’s really an open yet still an increasingly cut-throat market! Nevertheless, the mark of a good player is to pounce on the opportunity as and when it appears. Yes, with so much data right in front of you, you have to be a quick-learner, gain insight from what your competitors are doing to achieve the best results, have a look at their posts and how they’re structured. In fact, you might want to have a look at your own popular social posts to imbibe what’s catching your audience’s attention.
You could further benefit by engaging with your audience personally, through surveys, or monitoring and traffic data from Google Analytics. As you get to know more and more about your target audience’s tastes, habits, preferences and behaviors, your job will get much easier in trying to provide them what they want.
2 Draw A Mission Statement and List Your Most Important Goals
As previously mentioned in the article the road of content marketing is a long and arduous one, so you have to cover it in a marathon-style. Before you get down to conjure up new ideas for your content, think long and hard about the various aims of it other than the SEO benefits. When you know what you’re trying to achieve, your efforts can be effectively directed towards that end. Your goals will act as an anchor to which your future assignments could be attached.
A mission statement does just that. It communicates your objectives in a coherent and concise manner. For instance, an anonymous brand seeks to provide helpful, informative and practical tips and suggestions for soon to be married couples on how to save money on their wedding budget.
In this statement, one could easily single out the target audience (soon-to-be-married couples), content form (helpful, informative, practical tips and suggestions) and the main objective (to save money on wedding budget).
In addition to that, there needs to be a further breakdown of the content. Content needs to be proportionately distributed to the areas of concern of the business; these could be brand promotion, content curation and the main crux (tips, suggestions, information) of the brand itself.
3 Immerse Yourself In Research
There’s no doubt, creating and commissioning content consume a great deal of time, but that’s where Google Alerts comes to the rescue. With Google Alerts you can really speed-up the content curation process.
You also want to stay on top of the popular news, views, videos and plethora of other things that are related to your niche. You can source some of the exciting content to be republished on your blog.
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4 Draft Ideas, Lots And Lots Of Them
Once you’ve prepared the mission statement, done the breakdown of the content, and with meticulous scrutiny made your best efforts to understand your target audience, you should be able to get your team around a table and brainstorm lots and lots of ideas.
The idea could be, for instance, in the form of a headline that you can later tweak and twist to turn into an appropriate title. So come up with a bunch of catchy titles keeping your audience’s overall interests in consideration. If your content is intended for entrepreneurs and business professionals, then it would need to be conveyed in a more informative way, on the other hand, if it’s meant for say men’s interest then you might as well take a more casual and humorous approach.
A key thing to note here is that you can’t be overly self-promotional in your content. That way you’d only risk losing visitors. Your audience should be able to derive some utility from the content you’re producing.
5 List Down Your “Phenomenal Ideas” And Fire Them Away With A Suitable Medium
Different types of content require different mediums of distribution. Try to get acquainted with all the major forms of media that are used for communicating your business ideas. While blogs go well for most types of posts, some would be much more felicitous shared with infographics or videos.
This approach is likely to help you gravitate more readers to your content and help popularize your brand-image.
6 Make An Editorial Calendar And Rally Your Team To Work At It
It’s a nice time to make an Editorial calendar when you’ve got clear idea about the content and how it’s to be channeled through different mediums viz. emails, newsletters, magazines, blogs etc. An Editorial calendar will have all the data relating to social media posts and audit dates, and helps you not fall behind the schedule.
The frequency of how blogs go live on your website will vary depending on your budget and resources. It could be 3 blogs per week or even 3 blogs per day. But once you’ve got a solid plan, stick with it! With time you may start to charge for your articles and blog posts.
Of course, the “doctrines” that guarantee success are abound in the realm of effective content marketing. But a lot could be achieved by simply doing the simple things right. The notion that quality should always have precedence over quantity should be inscribed on a piece of stone and placed on the work desk of every content marketer! Pun intended, but that’s how important quality of any content is. Sharing bog-standard posts on a consistent basis won’t get you anywhere. Effective content marketing also means your posts should have a clear motive. It should be meant for a specific-audience while being helpful, authentic and informative at the same time.
To further better your brand’s Google ranking, you could opt for some SEO techniques. Post analytics could be used to track the popularity or disapproving response of the audience of your content. If a certain post attracts a large number of audiences, study overall structure and general tenor in which it’s been written, try to bring the same effect in your other posts and see the results. You could work in liaison with other websites if you see huge traffic diverted from their website to yours and in case you’re finding visitors aren’t staying on your website for too long, or that they move elsewhere after reading one or two blogs, then add more such similar or related content for them to read on and stay on your website.
These simple and clean measures go a long way in ensuring the overall success of your Content Marketing.
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