Don’t Fail Your Content Marketing Initiative – Try These
Of all strategies, content marketing seems to have become the favorite of brands and businesses in recent times. But running like a headless chicken in the race to be the best content marketer won’t do. In fact, it’s bound to fail.
How can you make sure that your content marketing initiative is a success? Here are the seven points on how to do it right. Whether you are already into it, or yet to start, these details will help you ensure success.
Step 1: Determine your goal. Before you take a step, sit back and determine what is it you want to achieve with content marketing. Seek answers to questions like what business objectives you have, and how can content marketing help attain those.
Also, chart out a course to incorporate content marketing into your overall marketing campaign. It isn’t an entity by itself; it’s an element of the bigger whole. Consider how you want your content to drive sales too.
Step 2: Create your user persona. Who are you writing the content for? If you have no clue about this, your content efforts will be directionless. Without a target audience in mind, you won’t know how to write content and make it appropriate for them.
Instead, create a user persona, with a name, a profile, likes and dislikes. This will help you determine what kind of content your users will find interesting, engaging, and worth liking, commenting or sharing, in short, worth interacting with.
Step 3: Decide your message. To understand this, consider the purpose of your business. Whether it’s your mission statement or you core message, it will be able to give you an idea about what you want to convey to your audience.
Also, consider how you want to do it. A blog is not the only content marketing tool. You can make use of other types of content too – infographics, interviews, guides, podcasts, white papers, eBooks, videos, and many other choices are available for use.
Step 4: Create content that matters. While content needs to have a message that reflects your business and brand, don’t make it too promotional. Otherwise, it will lose its charm. The best idea is to opt for a mix of promotional, motivational, emotional, and so on.
Another thing to keep in mind is the consistency of your content marketing efforts. You cannot expect it to yield results if you just post a bunch of articles on your blog, and forget about it. You need to be regular, in your posts, and in the manner of expression too.
Step 5: Pay attention to SEO. No keywords is almost as bad as too many keywords. And if you expect results from generic keywords, you are in for some serious disappointment too. Unless you are Wikipedia, plan your strategy, do your research, and use the best ones.
One oft-forgotten item is internal links. Whatever type of content you create, make sure there are one or two links that direct to other pages on your site. This enhances user experience, and boosts SEO benefits too.
Step 6: Promote your content. Creating great content is just half the task. Unless you create a buzz about it, it won’t be of much help. This is possible if you use your different marketing tools in conjunction.
Whether it’s sharing an infograph on Facebook or tweeting about a post, different social media platforms have made it easier to promote your content. Also, make sure it has lots of visual aids (images, screenshots, and videos) to add to its attraction.
Step 7: Measure your success. Is your content marketing strategy working? To understand this, you need to pay attention to the conversions. After all, every marketing strategy is used to boost sales, and this one’s no different either.
Consider adding calls to actions at appropriate places to boost user interaction and drive sales. Test out the position of these, and determine where they work best. After all, the aim of content marketing is to make the audience take the next step – buy from you.
