A little bit of sugar, a little bit of spice. Any good meal needs the perfect balance of ingredients, a reliable cookbook, and a bake time that is just right. Your content marketing strategy is not much different. With many competing chefs, your content recipe must keep your audience coming back for seconds. This demands a sound strategy. Regardless of your brand’s business goals or preferred channels, your content should always be a reflection of your brand and your target audience. A good cook creates dishes that satisfy and excite the taste buds of its customers. A good content marketer creates digital content that engages and excites the eyes of its audience.
The Power of Content Marketing
Content marketing generates 54% more leads than traditional marketing strategies. It’s all about improving reach and visibility with your intended audience through your different digital platforms. Quality content can establish your brand as a trusted resource, further develop your brand identity, and increase conversion rates and sales. There are endless benefits to having a solid content marketing strategy, making it critical to establish your goals and aspirations before diving right in.
Defining Your Goals & Audience
Quality over quantity; you’ve heard this thousands of times – but it’s especially true when it comes to your content marketing strategies. Large amounts of content constantly being blasted from your digital platforms can drive your audience away. Nobody wants to see your brand that much, sorry. 83% of marketers see quality content as their competitive differentiator. Produce media that will resonate with your audience. One incredible post that leverages emotion and demonstrates an understanding of your audience will almost always perform better than five mediocre posts promoting your brand. The best strategy is to find a balance between quality and quantity. Discover how much content your brand needs to be noticed while measuring which content types receive the most engagement.
Identifying Goals
When setting your content marketing goals, use the SMART methodology for maximum achievability. Set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals. This structured approach will keep you focused and goal-oriented. Your goals should be based on relevant past data while leaving room for forecasted expectations. You need to deeply reflect on and fully understand your brand to set the most realistic aspirations. Look at where you are right now and compare it to where you want to be at a future date. How are you going to get there?
Who is Your Audience?
At the core of any marketing strategy is the audience. Your digital platforms and the content, features, and resources found on these platforms should be carefully crafted and created specifically for your intended end consumer. This is especially relevant to your content marketing objectives. It all comes down to your brand’s ability to listen, most frequently and quickly, through solid data analytics. We will go more in-depth on the power of analytics later on, but for now, know that tracking consumer behavior and preferences through various metrics is the best way to get inside your audience's brain. You should learn as much as possible about your intended target - demographics, past purchase behavior, and preferred channels are just a few characteristics you should familiarize yourself with and study.
Your content marketing goals should be based on thorough research and realistic forecasts for your brand and audience. This can sound like a lot of “To-Do’s” before you actually get to creating and distributing your content. However, without a solid understanding of what makes up your business and its intended consumer, you will have no structure for your future content marketing strategies.
4 Types of Content
1. Infographics
Infographics are one of the most fun and straightforward types of engaging marketing content. They are usually bright, colorful, and packed full of valuable information. While time and cost effective, infographics offer endless ways to authentically display content about statistics, current events, and CTAs that are visually appealing and interactive. If infographics are balanced well with other forms of content, this small but mighty content type can be highly effective and well-liked by your audience. Infographics will likely find their home on your social media platforms, making their analytics easy to track and compare.
2. Video Content
Marketers are increasingly using video marketing because current digital users appreciate it. Creating high-quality video content will likely increase engagement, reach, and emotional connections between your brand and your audience. There are numerous video content types for your brand to experiment with, such as behind-the-scenes content or product tutorials. 54% of audiences want to see videos from brands they follow, making now a great time to leverage the different video strategies and identify what your audience likes to see and interact with.
3. Blogs
We love a good blog, obviously! Blog posts are about being a resource and answering your audience’s most important questions. Your posts should contain a balance of your brand’s unique offerings and valuable information about industry-specific questions. You can improve your SEO and conversion rates through your blog. This content provides your brand the best opportunity to showcase your authentic brand identity and establish yourself as an expert in various topics. Leverage a balance of text, engaging headings, and relevant images. You have the power to share whatever you desire with your audience.
4. Email Newsletters
Newsletters are one of the most common forms of email marketing. These messages are sent out on a regular, timely basis to brand followers or potential leads. One of the star benefits of email marketing is the direct line of communication established between your brand and your audience. Email newsletters are also easy to construct and won’t break the bank. If you create high-quality newsletters, your brand will likely see those subscribers become paying customers. By tracking your open rates and click-through rates, you can measure the success of your email tactics and identify the included elements that your audience loves seeing in your newsletters.
This list is not exhaustive; many content types exist to explore and experiment with. It all comes down to your audience. Depending on their demographics and preferred platforms and channels, you may find success with a specific content type and fail miserably with another. Listen to your audience and leverage your brand’s unique strengths and expertise. Your content should be a reflection of these elements.
Content Channels and Tactics
When it comes to marketing your content, there are three types of distribution channels: owned, earned, and paid media. These distinct avenues have their own benefits and best practices, so it is essential to educate yourself on them to ensure you are optimizing your content strategies effectively.
Owned Content
Lucky for you, we’ve already given you a crash course on owned channels. The four types of content we discussed above are all forms of owned content - the channel that is directly controlled by your brand. Examples are social media profiles, websites/blogs, and email newsletters. These are the content types that come directly from your mouth. Everything you distribute through these channels directly reflects your brand identity, values, and offerings. This channel type tends to be the most frequently used by many brands due to its low cost and high control. The more owned media you produce, the higher your chance of displaying a consistent and extended brand identity for your audience.
Earned Content
Paid Content
Paid media is all marketing strategies that you have to pay for. Don’t be afraid of paying for some of your marketing content, as this form of media can get the ball rolling for many businesses. There are many paid-for content types that can fit into your budget. Some examples are:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) content: PPC marketing is an online advertising strategy in which marketers accrue costs when users click on their ads. The goals of PPC are to increase sales, generate leads, and promote awareness for your brand. This type of media can drive consumers to your brand’s owned media types, with an end goal of evening out all previous costs.
- Sponsored Content & Ads: Paid ads are similar to PPC, with the mindset that your paid content will drive users to your organic and owned content types. By paying for advertisements, your brand can focus more on your content and targeting your preferred audience, not stressing whether the content will even be noticed.
- Influencer Marketing: Influencer marketing is one of the newest trends we have seen in the past few years. This strategy involves paying an online content creator to promote your brand on their social platform, usually interacting with and describing the features of your product or service. This strategy may not work for every business, so study your audience and determine if they have favorite influencers online.
There is no “perfect” or “right” channel to distribute your content. Many brands find success leveraging a mix of all three. However, if you are new to content marketing, it is crucial to establish your owned media first before expanding into paid advertising. Earned content will come organically, so don’t fret if you don’t see this form of marketing immediately. Constant measuring and evaluating success is at the core of any content marketing strategy. So, whichever channel or content type you prioritize, tracking analytics is still crucial for long-term success.
Optimizing Your Content Strategy
90% of B2B marketers who the Content Marketing Institute polled ranked content marketing strategies as successful because they measure their analytics. If you aren’t measuring and analyzing your metrics, how will you ever know what’s working and what isn’t? More importantly, you are much more likely to find the reason behind an issue and adjust your strategy accordingly before it is too late. Your data also reveals the truth behind your consumers’ behaviors. You can find out which types of content resonates most with your audience, saving you time and money by eliminating or altering another content type. Some of the most effective ways to utilize analytics in your content marketing strategies are creating audience segments, doing A/B testing, measuring ROI, and predicting consumer behavior. Maintaining data analytics on all your content types and channels will open the door to successful future marketing campaigns. At the end of the day, your content is only as good as the evidence you have that predicts its success. Use your data to support your strategies, and start convincing your audience that you are worth investing in.
Building a Sustainable Content Marketing Strategy
Let’s bring it back to your perfect content recipe. You have the ingredients or your content types and channels. The cookbook - your analytics, a recording of all of your strategies, and the measurements necessary to create the perfect dish. Finally, the cooking time. This is for you to experiment with. You obviously don’t want anything raw or overcooked, and it may take practice to discover how much nurturing and observation your strategy needs before it’s just right. Our world is increasingly becoming more digital, so take advantage of the opportunities to truly satisfy your audience. Send them home with full stomachs and happy hearts. With all of these elements in mind, you have your content marketing recipe. Recipes can be adjusted as consumer pallets change and new ingredients come into the mix. Listen to your audience in order to consistently craft some delicious content recipes.
