One fundamental change in how marketing works has to do with how audiences, now more than ever, access information to shape their purchase decisions. They do most of the research on their own and are more informed about what they will buy and why they will choose this over that.
They are turning away from traditional marketing towards a trust-based relationship with the companies they interact with.
In short, if they trust you, your values, ethics, products, experience, or ability, they are more likely to be interested in your company and invest their time and money in your solutions.
Your content strategy is the key aspect of any successful content marketing plan. In fact, it is the foundation upon which you can build any sort of marketing plan, and its effectiveness is something that should not be underestimated.
If you put out tons of very useful content but you do so without an underlying strategy, a reason why, you end up lacking the coherence that truly allows you to gain presence as a well-established brand.
You need a nimble, adaptable strategy that will consider the constant changes we are bound to be exposed to: customer expectations, marketing trends, new technologies, and culture shifts, among many others.
Some good practices to improve your strategies:
- Define and document your strategy
Make it crystal clear from day one to everyone involved in creating marketing material. It should always include the “what” and the ”why” behind the strategy. What it is that they should focus on and why that topic is of crucial importance.
- Designate a staff member to be responsible for your strategy’s success
At first, it might be just you but as you grow it is better to delegate. You can transfer this responsibility to your internal CMO and their team or you can rely on an external marketing agency.
- Publish content consistently on a channel your company owns
Social media and other distribution channels can change their rules in the blink of an eye. Not only that, but they sometimes fall out of favour. Do you remember MySpace? Imagine if you had invested all your content marketing into MySpace, you’d be out of luck now.
It is always better to create email lists, subscription services, and blog posts on your own platforms and use third-party channels for supplemental distribution or to funnel visitors towards your platforms.
- Focus on your content subscribers
When someone takes the time and effort to subscribe to your content publications, it means your content is something that caught their eye and they think it may be helpful to make their business grow. Discover their biggest challenges and publish content that meets those challenges effectively.
And finally, these are some tips that may be useful to get started:
- Use the aforementioned content marketing practices to develop a clear mission statement and business case.
- Provide guidelines for those to whom you delegate content marketing tasks.
- Focus on qualified prospects, with the main goal of attracting and converting them into paying customers.
- Find the channels your target customers prefer—and use them to publish your content.
- Calculate and track your content marketing plan’s return on investment (ROI), and then adjust your strategy to prioritize those methods that produce the best ROI.
In the future we will devote an entire blog post to the benefits of content marketing. We did include some in our first post on this topic, so go check it out in case you missed it.
And always remember, our contact section is always open for any type of enquiry or question you may have about your upcoming projects.