You know you need to communicate with your audience. But do you know sure ways for how to reach them? See our proposed tips below and implement these into your content marketing plan this year to help improve your outreach and engagement.
Understand your audience – at a deeper level
Basic demographics are important at a broad level. But you will want to drill down as deep as you can to reach your target audience. Make use of data-driven tools like Google Trends for up-to-date ideas, and then go to the source: use your CRM data, survey your customers to find out as many details as you can about their shopping habits, lifestyle, influencers they follow and so on. Read reviews they leave on your site and comments in your social media feeds to gain insights. A promo or giveaway is a great way to generate customer feedback while leaving them with a positive experience.
Focus on quality
You have a limited amount of time – or a limited budget – to create your content. Trying to produce too much at once will stretch you too thin and may result in flat efforts. Instead, focus your energy and resources on telling a compelling story. Start with an eye-catching title or headline followed by an engaging introduction. After you’ve told the meat of the story, wrap up with a summary and call to action. See also, “How to improve your writing – don’t believe the myth of multitasking.”
Create reusable content
If you’re putting the time, energy and money into creating quality content, you should include a plan on how you can get more out of it through repurposing. A well-written thought leadership piece can be recast as a blog or broken down into infographics and other digestible bits for your social media streams. That way, this one piece of core material can reach a range of audiences on different platforms. In other words, you’ve created quality content that can become quantity material.
Have a value-add focus
People know when they’re being marketed too. Successful content marketing should focus on providing useful information or entertainment for your audience. This approach builds trust and good will for you among your audience and sets you up as a valuable resource to return to.
Get organized
It’s a good idea to avoid the struggle to produce quality content or to try to scramble at the last minute to come up with ideas and execute them. Before the end of the calendar year create a rough lineup for the next 12 months’ content. Think about tying into seasonal or holiday themes when appropriate. You don’t have to rigidly stick to the outline if something comes up – say, a new product launch you want to highlight or an issue affecting your industry you want to address – but this calendar will help provide structure and keep you on top of things. Check out our editorial calendar for monthly content ideas here.
Set goals and metrics
Before putting your message out, make sure you have some great ideas for what you wish to measure and how you wish to present those results. Ask yourself: What are the strategic goals of your plan and how will you measure success or failure? Do we have some previous results to compare to? Do we wish to set a baseline for our results? Are we trying something new?
Keep in mind that content marketing is a long game. No matter how great your latest blog or social media post is, don’t expect an instant spike in sales. Remember that one of your key goals is to build a lasting and loyal brand following. Learn more about measuring the impact of your campaign on our blog here.
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