Content marketing has evolved drastically and has become a major component of both B2C and B2B marketing. But it is easy to notice that even though there is a huge increase in the number of businesses getting into content marketing, the number of people succeeding at content marketing is comparatively low. When done well, content marketing can help you/your company grow immensely and as we get into a new year, it’s the perfect time to rethink and improve your strategy. Here are 5 ways you can ensure that your content marketing strategy will be successful this year:
- Develop Your Target Audience
You’ve probably already developed a target audience for your marketing strategy. It’s time to go beyond the basics and delve into what your target audience looks like on every marketing channel – your blog, your social media accounts, your YouTube channel etc. Do they look the same across different platforms? What are their painpoints? How do they interact with me/my company/ my brand? How can we cater the each of their needs? These are all important questions you should be asking yourself. Developing your target audience and taking a detailed llok at your target audience will help you understand and target them better.
- Mission statement
Once you figure out whom you’re creating the content for, it’s time to figure out why. Figure out why your strategy is built in a certain way and see if that is still working for you. You have to have an aim (other than SEO) to your strategy. For example, a nutritional company could come up with a mission statement like “providing fun, healthy tips to students on-the-go to improve their health and fitness.” This statement will help them craft specific ideas, target their niche/audience group and showcase their main objective – health and fitness. If your entire strategy is aimed solely at SEO, it is more than likely you’re just writing for keywords and hindering your own chances of growth.
- Different Forms of Content
As competition in content marketing grows, it’s no longer enough to just have a blog for your site. As we get into a new year, it’s time to start getting into videos, podcasts, webinars, eBooks etc. These forms of content are on the rise and could provide valuable information to your customers – information that could convert them from leads to clients. Videos are the easisest way to connect with your audience, which explains why the number of videos by brands on Facebook increased over 3.6X last year. Visual content like infographics are great for social media – it could make an impact even with the audience’s limited attention span. You might also want to consider gated content like newsletters and eBooks to get more revenue while giving detailed and helpful information.
- Use the Right Channels
As I said before, your audience may vary across different channels. You could have the greatest ideas but posting them on the wrong channel, is pointless and wasteful. You need to put some effort and see what works best and where. For example, lengthy, informative pieces will do better on LinkedIn. However, you can pull out quotes from that piece and publish them on Twitter. There isn’t an exact science to find out what works where – but genuinely undeerstanding each channel and what each of them focuses on can help you grow tremendously.
- User Experience
2015 was the first year when mobile searches moved past desktop searches. All good marketers would have noticed this trend and worked accordingly. Creating high end content is just the beginning of your marketing strategy, you need to make sure that it is easily accessible to your viewers. Users are getting more accustomed to personalized content and marketers need to deliver. Check your site and content on various devices to see if everything from text alignment , loading speeds, images, response time to call-to-action forms can be used easily and work smoothly.
As a content marketer, you need to think fast – the field grows and evolves rapidly and you can’t stay stagnant. You could follow all the above points and still not be successful – the key is to keep analyzing your results and evolving accordingly. If you can’t figure out an effective strategy, you could always get external help from content marketing services.