Do you have a Digital Content Marketing Strategy in place? If yes, have you been using the same approach for a while or are you ready for an upgrade? If no, it’s never too late to plan for your businesses super successful future! You know your competition is hot on your heels and having an innovative content marketing plan is going to keep you way out in front. When Content Marketing in Minneapolis, you have an opportunity to create, own and manage all forms of tangible media from the written word to visuals to downloadable resources.
What Are Your Content Marketing Goals?
Before you leap into creating marketing materials, you must decide on the purpose of your content marketing. What is the ultimate goal for the content you will be putting out into the world? Who is your target audience and what are they going to find relevant and valuable? What pain point can you solve for your potential consumer? How will your content stand out, draw attention and be unique? Which channels will you use to publish your content and which formats will you choose to focus on? How will you schedule, manage and measure your efforts? The answers to these questions will help you to decide on your goals for your content marketing initiatives. An overarching goal is to create content marketing that offers the most cost effective route to gaining more website traffic, generate leads and result in higher conversions.
Calendar Planning
Once you have decided on your goals, it is time to create your content calendar. This shareable resource will be where your marketing team lays out its plan of action for all content creation, publishing, managing, and measuring. By using a calendar, you can get an overview on how you will distribute your content throughout the year. You can plan specific content publishing around key holiday times, major national or global events or other important dates for your company.
You will be able to easily spot if there is a gap in your plan. When you can see everything laid out in front of you, it is easy to see where you need to execute more content. You can also ensure that you will always have content ready to roll out at the given time. Planning means you can publish content consistently and your brand value goes up as people see you as a trustworthy supplier of relevant content. Your calendar will include both editorial and social media dates with an explicit content creation plan. When you start plotting your content management trajectory for the year, it can seem like an impossible task, but soon, this step by step approach will offer you immense rewards. There are many free content calendar templates online to get you started.
Crafting Attention Grabbing Content
Now that you have mapped out your content marketing strategy, you have to get down to developing the content. There are so many formats to use to get your message across including blog posts, eBooks, infographics, press releases, email newsletters, templates, webinars, video’s, vlogs and podcasts. Perhaps you will create a few useful lead magnets like white papers, slide-shares, book summaries, checklists, quizzes, case studies, content curation, original research, etc. The possibilities are endless. You have to look at what content draws the most traffic and conversions and repeat the success.
Time to Publish
Before you publish your content, make sure that it has been search engine optimized (SEO). You want to use the right keywords in your content creation to be able to draw your segmented, targeted audience to it. Make sure that you have chosen to create well-balanced content and that your content library is full of diverse pieces that position your brand as a thought leader in the industry and consistently delivers exceptional value. You also want to ensure that a lot of your content is evergreen and can remain relevant for people well into the future. Be open to including hot topics that come up suddenly – but because you are on top of your content creation and management, adding in timely articles is easy to execute. Right? These popular, current topics can generate spikes in lead generation whereas evergreen content is the gift that just keeps on giving.
Market Your Content
Yes, great content might find a huge following on its own, but most need a little TLC from a healthy backup of promotion. There are so many avenues to pursue, and your choices will also depend on your target market. But some options include:
- Reaching out to a major social media or industry influencer for a quote
- Do a guest post on someone else’s popular blog
- Extract snippets of content from the original document to use as social media posts. These could include quotes, stats, short statements and the title. Use hashtags!
- You can use paid for promotion tools like PPC ads, Google AdWords, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook advertising and paid search
- If you have used experts and industry sources in your content email, link to them so they can also read and share it
- You can get into contact with influencers or people in your forums or groups who have shared similar content to yours and introduce yourself and your content to encourage a possible share.
- Adapt your content by turning a blog into a video or podcast to attract an entirely different audience.
- Crawl your website to find the analytics that points to the content that received the most shares in the last year and then link your new content from your archived content
- You could use StumbleUpon’s Paid discovery service to promote your latest piece of content
- Use Outbrain to create content Ads of your latest piece of incredible content. There are a plethora of interesting sites out there that disseminate content. Try them all!
How Does It Measure Up?
The most important final step is to analyze your results. What is working and what isn’t? Measure and then tweak, repeat successes and continually innovate and optimize. Don’t forget to document your strategy. Those that end up documenting their strategies are more likely to consider themselves effective, are less overwhelmed by every challenging aspect of content marketing, and can justify their budget spend according to The Content Marketing Institute’s annual research. Also be sure to have your marketing team meet regularly to assess the efficacy of the plan and to make any necessary changes to be able to reach your goals.
