To create successful content, you need a strategy that all your marketing materials will follow. This content marketing plan will guide and help you avoid different pitfalls when preparing your digital content. Therefore, before you write another blog post or prepare a newsletter, check what your content marketing strategy says. In this post, we will talk about the ways to promote your content and the most effective approaches to content creation.
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What Are You Aimed at?
Content marketing allows you to solve specific problems. Therefore, when working on a content marketing strategy, you should decide on the key goals you want to achieve with it:
- Increase traffic. With the regular creation of quality content, the number of visits to the site will constantly increase. Some part of the audience will even add the site to their bookmarks and share it with their friends.
- Increase loyalty. The loyalty of each client is directly determined by how long you can solve their problems for free. This indicator measures the number of repeat sales.
- Increase awareness. If you have useful materials, you can gain a reputation as an expert. This will help increase brand awareness.
- Reduce cost per lead. Content investment is a long-term thing. Traffic and leads are generated using even outdated content. Thus, the price of a lead will decrease.
No matter what your case is, it is important to have a clear plan of action when it comes to content production and promotion.
Elements of an Effective Content Strategy
There is no universal content strategy that will work equally well for all types of businesses. It all starts with the research process, which determines the further development of your tactic. The below elements are of primary importance for the creation of a content marketing strategy that works.
#1 – Your Target Audience
Content creation is designed for a specific target audience – that is, potential buyers, existing company customers, etc. Your goal is to be useful to them; this requires an understanding of the interests and needs of your target audience. For this, it is necessary to:
- Know about the desires of your consumers;
- Divide the target audience into certain segments;
- Determine an algorithm for finding the necessary information about each segment. You need to find out exactly what consumers are looking for and where they are looking.
As a result, you will get an idea of what to write about and what platforms to use for content promotion.
#2 – Competitors
It is necessary to determine what kind of content your competitors offer to your target audience, evaluate the information materials and the content strategy of your rivals. There are three key areas of analysis:
- Type of content (method of its presentation, format, proportions, and volume);
- Channels of content promotion (blogs, social networks, corporate sites);
- Frequency of publications (it is necessary to create a schedule according to which materials are published by competitors; this information will come in handy at the stage of drawing up a content plan).
After a full-fledged analysis of your competitors, you will know what goes well and not so well in the content marketing strategy of your rivals.
#3 – Types of Content & Its Format
At this point, it is necessary to choose the types of content you are going to publish. To this end, the effectiveness of any type of content for the target audience is evaluated to find out whether it can help achieve the desired results.
The most popular types of content are as follows:
- Interview;
- Cases;
- Question-answer format;
- Expert polls;
- Statistics data;
- Fact lists;
- Guides.
When it comes to content formats, there are a couple of effective options as well:
- Press release;
- Presentation;
- News article;
- Webinar;
- Video;
- Conference.
Different formats and types of content work for different purposes; therefore, you should find the balance. Content marketers highly recommend giving preference to video content formats as they make any content easy to perceive and comfortable to watch. What is more, video posts make brands closer to their target audience and build a strong connection between the two. If you are going to produce multimedia content, this video software will come in handy. For more sophisticated clips and movies, you can always use a professional online video editor. This multimedia software is compatible with both Windows and Mac and can be even used on mobile devices.
#4 – Optimization
It will be hardly possible to promote your digital content without an SEO optimization strategy. And the following content metrics are of critical importance here:
- Content relevance. It is determined by the engagement metric. The content needs to be relevant to the audience and the niche you cover.
- Content quality. The texts must be of the highest quality possible, do not contain plagiarism, and are error-free.
Apart from the above, you need to develop a semantic core, which will be the basis for creating the material. You should identify queries that are appropriate for your topic and match the search patterns of your customers.
#5 – Brand Strategy
Content marketing is aimed at creating an original company image. By accurately defining your own style in the first step, you can easily understand what kind of content is right for your brand. In this case, it is necessary to answer the following questions:
- What is the audience’s impression of your brand at the moment?
- What are the principles of identity?
- What are the distinguishing features of your brand?
- Which other brands are motivating your target audience to take certain actions?
Content marketing should have a strategy that tells a specific story with your brand as the main target.
Expert Say!
It would seem that everything is simple in content promotion. You just need to select keywords, write quality content, publish it – and the job is done. However, it is not so easy. Almost every company is engaged in content production and promotion, but only a few get real benefits from this business. This is because a content strategy requires a complex approach and cannot be successfully run without full-fledged preparation. We hope these methods for promoting your content have inspired and have become food for thought for you.