If you’re engaging in content marketing of any kind, then you’re using a strategy. It might not be an official, planned, or effective strategy, but it’s a strategy.
Think of all the time, resources, and effort that go into creating good content. It’s not cheap, so it’s important that you direct that valuable content using a proper strategy. Here are five ways to step up your content marketing game.
Be Smart With Your Resources
Content marketing can get expensive, whether that means you investing a large amount of your time to creating content, or spending money outsourcing it to a creative. Something as expensive as content marketing needs to be directed wisely and looking at analytics is a big part of that.
Can you imagine putting in all those resources only to find out you’ve been pushing your content on Facebook when the majority of your marketing traffic was actually coming from Instagram and Pinterest? That hurts; and you wouldn’t be the first person to experience that. Take some time to look at your social media analytics so you can direct your content at the right platforms and audiences.
Meet With Your Team Often
You may have a team dedicated to content marketing, or you may not. In either case, it’s important to meet at least once a week and touch base with the people responsible for creating and promoting your content. If you can, meet daily.
Talk about anything new that’s been made since you met last. Look to the future and delegate tasks to the right people. Discuss what your competitors are doing and how you can improve on their content.
Bonnie Hunter, marketing blogger at Australia2Write and WriteMyX
These meetings are also a great time to put your heads together and do some brainstorming. What are some hot trending topics your team could be building content around?
Build Your Audience
Focus on growing your audience. New legislation is dictating that data must be gathered by consent, which means data is given up willingly and not harvested. Content marketing is even more important with the advent of this legislation because good content is a great way to encourage people to happily hand over their information.
When people like your content, they will offer up their data because they want to keep receiving your stuff. Think about how much more effective a model that is than scraping the internet for data of people who could not care less. It gives you an opportunity to build a relationship with people and allow them to feel connected to your content.
Billy Baker, content marketer at BritStudent and NextCoursework.
Take the temperature of how effective your efforts are by looking at your audience personas, checking your numbers versus last year, and seeing if your subscriber count correlates with content marketing efforts.
Set Appropriate Goals
If you don’t know what your content marketing goals are, how can you possibly achieve them? A big part of setting these goals will be based on your analytics, examples:
- What platform are you creating goals for?
- Where do you want to be in a year?
- Do you want to increase your followers, then by how many?
Or maybe you just want to increase user interaction and traffic. Once you have your big yearly goal, it’s time to break that down into smaller, more approachable monthly goals. These will be your stepping stones to reaching that big, overarching goal. The last step is figuring out what daily tasks you need to get after to make those bigger goals a reality.
Define How You’ll Measure Success
You need to track your content’s performance if you want to know how effective it is. Are you going to track hard metrics like sales and leads or soft ones such as social media user engagement? Some metrics you’ll definitely want to track are consumption metrics (how many people view or download your stuff), sharing metrics, lead generation metrics and sales metrics.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a dynamic activity that requires a willingness to change strategy when something is not working. It’s important to have goals and to know what your metrics for success are. It’s also not cheap, so be smart with how you direct your resources. Follow these five tips to step up your content marketing game.
