Month: May 2021

It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here.

1. Blog Posts

If you haven’t noticed yet, you’re currently reading a blog post. Blog posts live on a website or content portal and work best when they are published regularly in order to attract new visitors.

Blog Posts should provide a degree of value in terms of content for your audience, this is what makes them spend time on your blog, take notice of your brand and inclined toward sharing posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but you can experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

 

2. Videos

Videos are an extremely engaging content medium, they are highly shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. While it is true that Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity they are 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

It is a medium worth experimenting with. Our Research has found that video is the most preferred form of content. Video also captures people’s attention more than any other

3. Podcasts

A podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing — India has emerged as the third-largest podcast listening market in the world after China and the US, with 57.6 million monthly listeners.

If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

4. Ebooks

Ebooks act as downloadable lead-generation tools for your potential customers once they are done submitting a lead form with their contact information. Ebooks will typically be longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which normally work well to attract visitors to a website.

You can also use ebooks to achieve different objectives depending on your team’s goals. After reading a blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more information. This is where calls-to-action (CTAs) come into play, directing people to a landing page where they can submit their contact information and download an ebook to learn more valuable information for their business.

In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

5. Case Studies

Case studies are an opportunity for you to tell a story of customers who have succeeded in solving a problem by working with you. A case study is one of your most versatile type of content marketing because it can take multiple different forms — some of which are already on this list. Case studies can take the form of a blog post, ebook, podcast, infographics or  even a video.

A case study’s primary objective is to show people who are considering your offerings, that there is proof in the pudding. Before you choose a customer for a case study, you need to determine which format you want intend to produce this testimonial in and most importantly the area of your business to which you’re trying to drive value.

6. Templates

Templates are very handy content formats to try, they generate leads for you by being of tremendous importance to your audience.

When you provide your audience with templates you not only help them save them time and help them succeed but also demonstrate why you are the expert at what you do,  they’re more likely to keep engaging with your content in and will take notice of your brand the future.

7. Infographics

Infographics organize and help your audiences visualize data in a more compelling way than text alone.

Infographics are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

8. Tools & Applications

You could develop free tools and applications that provide an aspect of your offering or offer information that can be of tremendous value to your audience in return for potential audiences contact information, not only will your audiences spend more time engaging with you but also convert into sure shot leads for your business.

9. Social Media

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites.

This could mean repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog, creating original content specifically for external sites or publishing website content on various social networks.

Posting on social media, however, is pivotal to amplifying your brand’s reach and delivering your content to your customers where you know they spend their time. Social networks on which businesses often post include:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Snapchat
• YouTube

When launching a business account on any of the social networks above, it’s important to post the type of content your followers expect to see. On Instagram, for example, users want photos, videos, and graphics that reflect current events, show off user-generated content, or even go behind the scenes of your organization.

On Facebook, your options for what to post open up a bit: Not only can you share your blog posts and website content, but you can also post native Facebook videos, product promotions, and original memes that resonate with your customers. You can also interact with other businesses that have a similar audience as your own.

While the goal on social media sites like Instagram or Snapchat is to connect more intimately with your audience, your goal on platforms like Facebook and Twitter is to expand that audience, drive traffic toward your website, and start conversations in your industry. Do some basic market research to discover which platforms your buyers are on, and mold your content to their expectations.

Why do Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing helps you prepare and plan for robust, scalable and cost-effective sources of website traffic, engagements and new leads which ultimately translate into revenue for your business.

In short, If you have the resources to simply create even one single blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, something like a free tool or an embedded link to an e-book will gradually generate leads and continue yielding results even long after you have Published.

Once you have a reliable source of traffic and leads from such content, your confidence of having developed it in the first place, will allow you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, like co-created content, sponsored stories, social media advertising, and distributed content. Your content will not only help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand it will also help attract leads that have a higher propensity to convert into sales.

7 highly important steps that Marketers should make a note of, to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

1. Define your goal.

What’s your purpose of developing a content marketing plan? Exactly Why do you want to produce content, what will it mean for your business and how will it help increase your revenues ? Clearly defining your ambitions even before you begin planning will ensure that you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy.

2. Take cognisance of you Consumer Dynamic.

To develop a plan that ultimately works, you will first need understand who your content’s target audience is most likely to be — also known as your buyer persona.

For those who are starting out or are new to marketing this step is extremely critical. Knowing your target audience, allows you to focus on producing more relevant and valuable content that your audience will want to read and engage with.

If you’ve been in the game for a while and you feel that your target may have changed. Ask yourself these questions before you begin, Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience?

Re-assessing your audience parameters by conducting market research every year is crucial to growing your audience.

 

3. Do a content audit.

It is easy to start out with simple blog posts, but before you can get down to creating other forms of content and investing time, effort and monies it would be good to consider exactly which formats of content that you will most likely focus on.

e.g. If you run a blog and have been posting stuff consistently for a year now, creating an e-book or a video that summarises key messages from all your blog posts into one ultimate guide or video would be one way to offer information in a different format.

Experienced marketers should make it a point to review content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year by doing a content audit. This will help them understand what can be done differently in the coming year and gives them a sense of what new goals they would want to achieve.

4. Pick a content management system.

Invest in a system that helps you create, manage, and track your content, otherwise known as a content management system (CMS). A few important components of content management include content creation, content curation, content publication, and content analytics.

5. Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:

Google Trends

Google Ads Keyword tool

HubSpot’s Website Grader

Feedspot / Feeder.co

BuzzSumo

Blog Post Headline Analyzer

TubeBuddy

Canva

6. Identify the types of content you want to create.

There are a many options out there for content formats you can create. Blogs, Infographics, Videos, Case Studies & Infographics are few most widely consumed content formats.

Think of which type of content will deliver your message to your audiences most effectively and on which platform.

7. Publish and manage your content.

Your content marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create be sure to also cover how you will eventually organize and schedule your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Diwali in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates.

If there are events that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media around this period as well.

Content Strategy Examples

To understand what a content strategy is, it’s probably helpful if we explore some examples of real-life content strategies based off a few various business goals. 

To start, let’s explore an example of a content strategy used for SEO purposes (with the ultimate goal of attracting new prospects to a website). 

Evernote’s blog offers a wealth of knowledge around the topic of productivity. The blog post, How To Stay Disciplined When Times Are Tough, made me laugh out loud — and then incentivized me to grab a pen and write down some of the tips I liked best. 

But why is a company that sells a note-taking app writing about discipline?

Because it’s how we found their website, when we searched “How to stay disciplined” on Google. 

Evernote is a good example of a content strategy used to attract new leads. People interested in reading content related to productivity are likely the same people interested in downloading Evernote’s note-taking product (because what’s better than a to-do list for helping you stay on-task?). 

On the contrary, if Evernote’s marketing team simply created content for the sake of increasing traffic — like publishing “Our 10 Favorite Beyonce Songs” — it wouldn’t be considered a content strategy at all; it would just be content.

A strategy needs to align content with business goals — in Evernote’s case, the strategy aligns content (blog posts on productivity) with the business goal of attracting leads (people interested in note-taking) to their site. 

It doesn’t matter whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been working with the same approach for a while, it almost always never hurts to re-look at your content strategy plan — to make sure it’s up-to-date, dynamic, and engineered to engage with your prospects and customers.

The first step you’ve got to take to ensure that you are ahead of your competition & while actively engaging your audience, no doubt is to have a robust, smart content marketing plan in place.

If you’re planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

What is content strategy?

A strategy that takes your business objectives, and uses content as a primary means to deliver results and outcomes based on those objectives. 

For example, your business objective this year may be to increase awareness and subsequently generate greater revenues. Now to achieve your target you could look at a content strategy that focuses on substantially increasing your brands visibility across digital and social media platforms which in turn will drive traffic to your brand assets and the outcome of which will ideally be an increase in revenues.

You might assume that a content strategy is a ‘nice-to-have’, but not entirely necessary early on. But developing high-quality content to meet business KPI’s can help organisations build trust with new audiences and, ultimately, succeed over a sustained period of time. 

A good content strategy is the foundation of your attract and delight stages in a consumer’s purchase journey. Along with enticing new prospects to your brand, you might also use a content strategy to drive sales and ensure overall customer satisfaction. 

70% marketers actively investing in content marketing.

That’s part of the reason it is critical for you develop a good content strategy to compete in your industry.

Before you begin working on your brand’s content strategy there a few questions that are imperative for you to have answers to, let us help you understand them better.

1. Who is going to be reading your content?

Who is the target audience for your content?  What is the target size of your addressable audiences ? Just like your business may have more than one type of customer, your content strategy should be able to cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.

Using a mix of content types and platforms will help you deliver different content to each set of audiences you have in mind and engage everyone your company’s value chain.

2. What is the problem that you would solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally your product or service solves a problem that exists in the market segment you operate in. In the same way, your content educates your audience about this problem as they begin to identify and consider your solutions to address it.

A good content strategy supports people on both sides of your solution or service: those people who are still in the process of identifying what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your solutions or service to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces your offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.

3. What sets you apart and help you stand out ?

The competition is very likely have a similar offering, which elevates the need for your potential customers to know what makes yours better or unique. This is where content comes in.

In order for audiences to consider you brand and to prove why you’re worth buying from, you need to prove why you’re worth listening to.

4. What content formats will you include ?

What form of content will you create? Images? Videos? Infographics ? Blog posts? Once you have short listed the topics you want talk about, you will need to figure out which formats to park your marketing spends on, to deliver optimum outcomes.

5. What platforms will you publish on?

Just like you create content across multiple formats, you also have different platforms that you can publish them on. Platforms can include owned properties, like your website, blog or social media handles, like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

6. How will you manage creating, curating & publishing content ?

Trying to understand how to go about creating, curating and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It makes it all the more important for you to have a content strategy to know who’s creating what, where it’s being published, and when it’s going live. Today’s content strategies prevent clutter by helping you manage content from a topical standpoint. Planning a content calendar around topics, makes it easier for you to visualize your company’s message and assert yourself as an authority in your market over time.

7. How will you prioritize what content needs to be promoted ?

One part of a content marketing strategy is to arrive at a content calendar, but in today’s scenario with declining organic reach across digital platforms it will need to be made in conjunction with an equally scalable and efficient promotion plan, that ultimately ensures that your content reaches the people who make a difference to your business objectives and are most likely to engage with your brand.