The Year Of Nailing Your Content Marketing Strategy

The Year Of Nailing Your Content Marketing Strategy The single most dominant change in marketing for all businesses over the last few years has undoubtedly been the shift away from traditional, soapbox style tactics to the new content marketing model. Its revolutionised the way business operate and how they speak to their customers. But the ‘content is king’ approach means that businesses are under relentless pressure to deliver fresh, exciting and personalised content to keep their audience onside. There is always someone else fighting for share of voice and relevancy, and for startups who are usually understaffed, meeting those conditions can be a struggle. Not only is there pressure to achieve a great return on investment, there is also a pressure to make eye catching videos, insightful blog posts and more. Thats why drafting a content marketing strategy is a hugely important move for any small business. Mastering Your Strategy Content works best when approached in a consistent manner that helps to establish your brand identity, and when there are clear aims for its production. Creating articles, white papers, podcasts and infographics is only really worthwhile when you have a defined audience, youve taken the time to map out goals for your content and you know that the topics youre covering are truly of interest and will enhance customer experience tor help to build a relationship in some way. Collaboration Is Key For content to be truly successful, it also needs to be seamless. That means a high degree of collaboration between IT support, creatives or marketing staff and management. Often this is far easier to achieve in small businesses who will typically have a greater flexibility in individual role remit and necessarily more of an all hands on deck approach. In larger organisations, such functions can typically become quite siloed and this can be hard to overcome. Content is everyones responsibility from the Web designers optimising pages for the newly generated traffic to flow through to the managing directors blogging about their day or the product sales team shooting a video on their new item. Where great content is found, it doesnt happen purely from the efforts of one team everyone within the organisation needs to understand the value and purpose of pursuing a content management strategy. This strategy starts from the top, as it must be aligned with the vision, values and direction of travel of the business as a whole. If not, not only will it never have the authenticity that audiences demand, but it wont be delivering the results that your business needs to support its wider goals. This can be fairly tough to achieve when set against the quite relentless pace that good content creation demands. Social media never sleeps, trending topics are constantly popping up and brands need to manage their output carefully in order to stay relevant. The key to keeping pace can only be relentless organisation creating and sticking to a schedule, maintaining a constant pipeline of ideas and also having the software to enable to to deliver from a robust CRM system which can give you a more data driven approach to what content needs to be planned in, to email marketing software which allows you to segment your customer base effectively and target the right people with what you produce, through to tools such as Hootsuite which allow you to preplan the promotion of your conte nt and even industry specific support software such as legal files case management or responsive product pricing tools anything which helps to organise the workload and support a data led approach. Connecting The Dots Networked thinking is something which companies often struggle to attain,  but its absolutely vital to sustain the pace at which good content creation needs to take place. Not only that, but content has to fit into the overall strategy of the business and support its aims and it cannot do this as an island. Marketing teams must be properly supported with a connected approach and connected tools to craft insightful and on target content. Technology needs to be integrated to properly support this aim. Often businesses can have a situation with a bunch of legacy programmes and software which dont communicate with each other or are ‘owned’ by different departments and this makes the job extremely difficult. Failed outreach campaigns, mismanaged email lists which breach data regulations and dead end links or poorly designed landing pages are the result of this and mean that all the effort to produce great content falls flat. If there is little understanding across all teams of the nee d for a joined up approach with people and systems and a lack of commitment towards controlling the problem, then the pieces your business has gone to a lot of trouble to produce will not drive results no matter how much they resonate with the audience, and internally you are likely to come across many complaints about the proportion of time taken to create the content versus the results its delivering. Demonstrate The Value Its a little bit chicken and egg but sometimes the situation can be easier when marketers are able to demonstrate the effectiveness of producing great content. This starts with connecting to different departments to align the aims of marketing with those or other areas of the business to create the correct goals for the marketing work. Then it continues when a proper feedback loop is put in place to ensure that insights and learnings from different teams are shared and woven into the messaging and approach of the content. A strong demonstration of return on investment can also convince those who may be initially reluctant to engage in the approach and make them realise that this approach, which can often seem very ‘soft’ when set up against the hard metrics of sales targets can actually translate directly into enhanced profits. When new software platforms or work to integrate legacy systems is needed, its then far easier to demonstrate why that investment needs to be prioritised when it can be shown in alignment with wider business goals and as a profit driver rather than a drain. Be Driven By Data As much as content marketing cannot work in isolation as a function of the marketing team, it also needs to be supported by smart data decisions. There is a need to tell great stories but they have to be ones which connect with the audience and tell them wavy they want to hear. Youll find this out through careful attention to your customer data. Tracing the customer journey is hugely informative and will show you which touch points and interactions the customer has had with you. Identify the key data points and it can really help you to shape your content strategy and drive the direction you go in. Algorithms will continue to develop to the point that they get super intelligent about suggesting tends and come up with relevant content based on big data patterns of consumption and the goals of your business. How To Nail Your Process Key Takeaways Do some competitor analysis If youve been patchy with content marketing so far, spotting odd bits here and there but never being consistent and not managing to achieve the reach that you need to, then its time to go back to the drawing board. Take a look at what your competitors are up to both immediate competitors and aspirational ones. What does their content look like? How often are they posting? What sentiment are they generating? SimilarWeb is a tool which can really help you to see how your equivalents blog posts and other content is really performing and this gives you a sense of what you do and dont want to do. Of course, its not wise to simply copy your audience can smell inauthentic content a mile off. You need to find your own style and tone of voice. Content needs to be fresh and original to achieve its full potential. Research your audience If you dont have a clear idea of who youre talking to, you wont be able to create content responsive to their needs. Understand your audience truly and youll be able to produce videos and articles that speak their language and are likely to be highly successful as youll know exactly what to post, and when and where to post it. Define your goals Knowing what you want your content to achieve is half the battle. Good data should inform you as to what is possible, but make sure you also understand what social media success looks like in your industry. Depending on the industry you operate in, the parameters of success will be a little different. Tap in your project team As content has to be the aim of the business as a whole, depending on the size of your operations you may need to tap in lots of different teams to support your strategy. The content youre aiming to create and the budget you have available will dictate the shape of this team, but it may involve web developers, copywriters, external agencies, SEO specialists, media bookers, sales or even technical staff that havent traditionally been involved in marketing work. Make sure everyone is clear on the aims and the scope of the project. Lay down a schedule To have an impact and build on your gains you need a consistent schedule for production and publishing at the heart of your strategy. Pencil in regular ideas meetings to help you define audience needs, topics of interest which are coming up, whats trending and what you need to promote. Having this committed to paper doesnt mean that you cant adapt as you go along but it does mean that you wont be scrabbling around for content, going long gaps without publishing anything or missing promoting key messages. Establish your feedback loop Finally, now that you have your metrics, you must ensure that you close the feedback loop by understanding how your content has performed and being able to become responsive to the picture that your analytics are showing you. Tracking results shouldnt be done as an academic exercise you need to use your findings to improve as you go along and as things change over time with what your audience responds to. Content marketing is easy to get into but harder to be truly good at it takes skill to accurately draw all the threads of a campaign together and hit on a winning formula. But its all about trial and error, so dont be afraid to try new things. With your process, your research and your data in place, you can create the ideal plan for your customers and reap the rewards.