They say, “Content is king,” but, how can your content really be king over other online competitors? We will teach you efficient ways to achieve content marketing success.
As technology advances, more and more marketers are looking for better ways to improve their marketing strategies. Nowadays, consumers aren’t any fonder of the traditional marketing campaigns such as television and magazine ads. They are now more adept and exposed to online “surfing”. This is where content marketing gets in the picture.
What exactly is content marketing about?
According to Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute,
“Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Content marketing’s aim is to communicate with existing and potential customers without selling your products or services. Instead, content marketing is focused on creating and delivering valuable content to produce more intelligent buyers.
As content marketers, consistently delivering valuable information to our customers can result in business, sales, and customer retention and loyalty.
Contributors to content marketing success
So, how do you deliver valuable information to customers while attracting and driving profitable customer action? Here are key contributors you should consider to achieve content marketing success:
- A mission statement. To keep you focused on your content marketing goals, you need a mission statement that will serve as your vision board. It can also keep your efforts directed and aligned in attaining your goals.
To create your mission statement and set a path for your content marketing strategy, you can ask yourself the following questions:
- What is/are my goal/s?
- Who is my target group of audience?
- What value can I add to my target audiences’ experiences?
- What approaches can I do to deliver these values?
Creating a mission statement helps you define your business, products or services, and target audience. More than that, it serves as your overall guide for all your marketing decisions. Check a few examples here.
- Audience or buyer persona. Visualize and create a buyer persona that represents the majority of your target audience. Creating a buyer persona can help you design a more powerful, engaging, and personal content for your targets.
In creating and mapping out your content marketing strategy, consider the buyer persona you visualized, and think of strategies on how you can help him/her address his/her needs through your content.
- Right mix of content. Make sure that every content you will publish is consistently aligned with your mission statement or your business goals. Focus on quality rather than quantity. More so, you must serve your market with the right mix of content.
Effective content can be in the form of visuals, infographics, blogs, case studies, downloadable PDF content, interactive posts, quizzes, podcasts, videos, and many others. For marketers the top content picks are:
- 45% | Blogs
- 34% | Visuals
- 19% | Videos
- 02% | Podcasts
According to statistics, 45% of marketers consider blogs as the most important in content strategy. In fact, for this year, 69% of marketers plan to increase and improve their blogging efforts. Marketers who consider blogging a priority have 13x more chances of achieving a positive ROI.
- Strategic content distribution. “He who fails to plan is planning to fail,” says Sir Winston Churchill, a former British Prime Minister. True enough. You need to be armed with a documented strategy for content creation and distribution. A documented strategy is also the secret of the most efficient content marketers.
Take some time to test different content distribution platforms and see which works best for you. Google AdWords, Social Media channels, Email, and eNewsletters are only a few of the media you can use to distribute your content.
For B2B marketers, LinkedIn works best while Pinterest or Facebook is the best choice for B2C marketers. Content distribution through eNewsletters is also considered as the most effective content marketing strategy for B2C businesses.
You can also try mixing free and paid content distribution methods to get your message out to your target market or community.
- Metrics and ROI tracking. Setting up metrics helps evaluate the performance and efficiency of your content marketing strategy. According to statistics, 30% of B2C marketers consider sales as the most important content marketing metric. 82% of B2C businesses set sales as their #1 marketing goal.
Although the output of content marketing does not come easy, over time, you can observe progress in qualified leads and sales. If your reports do not show much progress, then it’s time to reevaluate and revise your content marketing strategy.
- Contributors and influencers. Another factor to consider is to get contributors and influencers work with you. Contributors can give you multiple perspectives on a certain topic on which you can generate fresh and new content ideas.
Conduct interviews, collaborate, talk to representatives from different departments, or invite guest bloggers. You can also contact influencers to work with you. The huge following of influencers can help you reach a wider audience.
Content marketing is no piece of cake, but with the right strategy, you can be as successful as other renowned content marketing giants. Incorporate the above key contributors to power up your content marketing strategy!
