6 Steps To A Killer Content Marketing Strategy

A good idea is a powerful weapon. If content marketing is marketing designed to heighten the potential of your brand, then the idea that the content is centred around is the foundation for your entire campaign.

So, how do you create an idea that has the potential to raise the profile of your brand? We put it to you that regardless of the size, scope and style of your business, innovation is the key.

Step 1 – Collaboration Is King

Content marketing moves fast. Extremely fast. In digital marketing, you are only as good as your best content idea. Therefore, every effort needs to be taken to generate the best possible idea, and when it comes to ideas, the more brains involved the better.

In the days of old, it used to be that individuals in companies would sit separately in their own little cubicles, and would work on their own ideas. Of course, things have changed and you’d be hard pressed to find an office that isn’t open plan, spacious and collaborative.

Collaboration is crucial for idea generation and is almost certainly the best approach to take. Get your team together, stand up and find a quiet room. It’s all about bouncing ideas off one another and throwing things against the wall to find the best ideas.

Target Content On Where Consumers Are In The Buying Process

Surprisingly, according to a study from eConsultancy and the Content Marketing Institute, only 40% of UK marketers are using this tactic to decide what content they should be publishing.

1. It keeps the content relevant – and that’s the goal!
2. It helps to generate leads.
3. Because it’s attributed to your sales process, it’s valuable, and therefore can quite easily be attributed with an ROI.

Here’s How It Works…

You can quite easily create a plan which targets each of these stages within the buying funnel, in a format suitable for your audience at that stage. The result should be that your customers turn into promoters; talking about you, tweeting about you, and generally just saying really good stuff on your behalf, becoming earned assets which you can continue to reap the benefits from thanks to all your hard work you put in up front.

 Step 2 – Translating Customers’ Problems Into Content

It is a fact that people love nothing more than a problem solver. Agony aunts still plague magazines and tabloids. Q&A sites are becoming increasingly popular and cover everything from medical problems to how to grow vegetables. Everyone loves a problem solver.

Importantly, problems are emotive subjects. They’re personal to the beholder and consume their minds, causing stress and anxiety when there is no solution. Become the problem solver, and you’ll be talking directly to your customer, on their level, and to their emotions. It’s a well-known fact that people buy people. So building a relationship and addressing your customers’ emotions with understanding, empathy and ultimately a solution creates a strong bond. And this applies to B2B as well as B2C.

Don’t tell them things that are just not relevant though, like how many widgets your gadget has. What they really want to know is how you are going to solve their problem. In their language. Not jargon.

They’re asking “Great, but how does this help me?”

Think benefits over features.

Here’s how:

1. Create a list of problems your customers have (you might have to actually talk to your customers to do this, and ask them what their biggest problem was that you fixed for them).
2. Create a list of solutions you offer to counter them (but keep it benefit driven, not feature driven.).

3. Curate the solutions into broad topic areas; lists, how-tos, complete guides to… soon enough you’ll have a bunch of resources that you can begin to create, based on solving a problem for the customer rather than selling a feature-driven solution.

Step 3 – The Format: Finding Your Target Audience

Content promotion isn’t simply about tweets, posts, pins and photos. It’s about targeting your audience and finding out which platforms they populate daily. Integrating your content on a channel that your audience uses every day is a simple way to get your brand noticed for all of the right reasons. So how do you know where your audience hang out? Research.

If your target audience are males under the age of 35, Facebook and YouTube are where you will find them. But if females over the age of 35 are your target demographic, focus your content marketing efforts on Facebook and Twitter. Be sure to keep an eye on the channels that your competitors are using and the track the response they are getting. Social tools like BuzzSumo are ideal for identifying key influencers in your industry by helping you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Choose A Channel

Once you have found where your audience is, you can then use this channel to communicate your message. In order to locate potential brand ambassadors that will share your content, you must find a channel that complements your brand and the type of content you wish to promote.

Step 4 – Content Promotion: The Key to Content Marketing Success

Social Channels

Will you be engaging your customers with interesting blog content via Twitter and Facebook or would your content be more suited to YouTube or Pinterest? You don’t have to pick one and stick to it, experiment with a few channels to see which one works for you.

Facebook and Twitter may be the most popular channel but if you are a beauty, fashion or lifestyle brand trying to target a young demographic, an image based platform like Pinterest or Instagram may be more appropriate.

Tailor Your Content For Social

The key to content curation is maximising your chance of success on each of your chosen channels. For example, rather than pushing out the same content on Twitter and Facebook, tailor your status updates accordingly. Updating each social platform with the headline of your article or infographic is not going to engage key influencers so take a moment to make each update bespoke and give your followers a reason to share it. If you are using Twitter as your chosen channel use a hashtag to expand your reach and use a URL shortener like Bitly to make your tweet more reader friendly.

Paid, Earned And Owned

Without content promotion, a huge social following or a database full of engaged email subscribers, your content will probably fall on deaf ears. The best way to tackle this problem is to use paid methods, like PPC, display advertising and email list buying to increase your owned channels – like your email subscriber list and your social media channel.

When you continue to deliver great content, these subscribers, followers and customers become your brand ambassadors, earning you great reviews, testimonials, and ultimately promoting your messages for you, meaning that the initial cost of earning and owning those channels through paid media can be reduced.

Step 5 – How to Measure Your Content Marketing Success

Objective: Attract Strangers

Taking this concept, you may decide that because you are targeting ’Strangers’, you will be creating infographics, videos and blogs, increasing your SEO rankings and general PR. Measures for attracting strangers will be things like:

Backlinks

Achieved by people liking your content and sharing it with their network through their blog, their website, or some other link generating method. This is the most effective way of increasing your SEO rankings.

Rankings

If you’re generating links back to your site, your rankings should improve. If you have good rankings, the likelihood of strangers stumbling across your site when they’re conducting informational searches increases.

Unique visits

Number of unique visitors to your site. The more the better – these are new people who have never visited before, and therefore represent awareness.

Onsite engagement

Bounce rate and time on site are both great indicators of engagement. Visitors should be browsing your site MORE and for LONGER if you’re creating engaging content.

Objective: Engage Visitors

If you want to work on keeping your visitors returning, and convert them to a lead or sale, you might want to start a relationship with them by signing them up to an email newsletter with the offer of a free report, industry whitepaper, or invite only seminar or workshop. Metrics you’re looking for here are:

• Number of leads
• Number of email subscribers …and then unique opens and clicks within the email showing the engagement.
• Number of returning vs new visitors …this will tell you if your content is genuinely valued, as you will see an increase in returning customers the more compelling your content.
• Number of downloads …if you are creating assets which are downloadable you can both collect email addresses in order to send the asset via email, and you can track the downloads to assess the success.
• Number of attendees …if you’re holding in-person events, track the number of attendees (and encourage them to bring a friend!).
• Video views …you can see this and you can access drop-off stats within YouTube, mirroring the drop off against your video.

Objective: Convert Leads

Once you have your lead, the idea is to close. For that lead to become a customer they need to trust you. This is of paramount importance. You’ll be providing testimonials, case studies, data sheets, calculators, and analysis – all kinds of tools that will help your lead to make that important decision. The key metric here…

• Conversions …yep. That’s it. If your objective is to close, then there isn’t a better measure than how many you closed vs how many leads you had.

Step 6 – Iteration: The Last Step In The Content Marketing Lifecycle

As a simple definition, iteration refers to the process of taking a thing, looking at how it can be improved, and then replicating the original thing with those improvements. It’s not a complex process, but it’s one that virtually any system, product, model or idea can be improved by.

In a content marketing context, iteration looks something like this:

1. Idea Generation
2. Content Targeting
3. Choosing the Format
4. Channel Selection
5. Measuring Success
6. Record/Report Successes
7. Return to 1, using 6 to guide you

As you can see, iteration is crucial to any long-term content marketing project. It allows you to both learn from your past mistakes and do something constructive with them, and it also allows you to take your strategy and move it forward rapidly.

In Summary…

Iterating on your content strategy is the last piece of the puzzle for content marketing, and it concludes our series on the subject. If you’d like any more advice on how to get started with your content marketing strategy, contact Ingenuity Digital to find out how we can help. So go, fellow marketers, and produce successful content marketing campaigns!