Content marketing is simply creating quality branded content across all media channels and platforms to deliver engagement with your brand, value to your customer base and is a great way to measure success for your brand. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds. In the following blog, I will give you a few tips to make the most out of your content marketing efforts.
Strategy
Penny Bartram, head of solutions EMEA at Bloomberg Media, cautions:
“With a surge in interest in content marketing, there is a risk that brands will create an abundance of content without thinking about who wants to consume it and how they want to consume it.”
So, it’s not about just filling your channels with content. What’s important is putting out the right content for your target audience. Therefore, knowing who your audience is and targeting them specifically is crucial for success. As a content marketer, you must be sure that your content is useful, informative and entertaining to who you are trying to reach and the best way to do that is to have a strategy. Otherwise, you will just be wasting time and money by blindly throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks.
Knowing Your Audience
Many brands think they know their audiences and some actually do, but many really don’t. If someone likes or follows your page, you can assume they like your brand, but what are their interests outside of that? How do they interact with online content outside of your page? What type of online content do they interact best with?
It’s important to remember that just because you are working for a specific brand, you may not be in that brand’s target audience. So, content that speaks to you and your interests might not be the same as the people you are trying to reach. You should be checking page insights and analytics regularly to make sure you are consistently putting out content that will “speak” to your audience. This will help you know what content type, frequency, days and times will best maximize your efforts.
Distribution
Brands do not spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce beautiful 30-second advertisements and expect audiences to find it ‘virally’ on YouTube. They buy TV and digital space, as well as, seeding it through their social media channels and the same should be true of content marketing. There are three methods of online content distribution: Paid, Owned and Earned. To maximize the success of your efforts, all three methods should be used in tandem.
If you’d like to learn more about content marketing or how to better achieve your overall online marketing goals, contact us today.
