Content marketing has been around for as long as humans have learned to speak. People are only becoming more aware of it now that many studies have been carried out on why certain businesses succeed and many others fail to succeed.
The difference most times lies in how these businesses marketed themselves to their audiences; how they make their audience perceived them in the first place. Content marketing is a strategic process focused on creating and distributing valuable and relevant information to attract a group of audiences with the ultimate goal of driving profitable sales. It’s a way of helping people to help you. This creates a sort of friendship relationship that breed clients that are loyal to your business because of the trust the you have induced in them. Content marketing is a very crucial aspect of any business and in this post we’ll share with you some of the best ways to start and succeed with your content marketing campaigns.
CONTENT MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR MAXIMUM IMPACT
SET YOUR GOALS AND MISSION STATEMENTS
The first step in starting your content marketing strategy is to set a clearly defined content marketing goals. This should be in the form of a mission statement. The aim of which is to help you focus more on the important things and know if the reason for the campaign is being achieved or not. Since content marketing is all about helping your audience to help you succeed, your mission statement should come in two ways: what you want to help your client achieve and the benefit in it for your business. As such your mission statement should clearly outline your target audience, the kind of content you’ll use to reach out to them and the benefits they’ll get from such contents.
SET YOUR KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS (KPIS)
A goal must be specific and measurable. This way, you’ll know whether you’re achieving, have achieved or are not achieving it. This will only be possible if you have set up measurable KPIs while setting up your mission statement. Your KPIs will be the indicators that will tell if you are achieving your goals. This could be in terms of setting milestones in the form of the number of monthly readership yo want for your blog, the number of subscribers within a given time frame, or even being invited for a particular talk show based on your marketing efforts. In the end, your KPIs should be those things that you want, however, they must be measurable so that you’ll be able to measure your progress and know what is working and what is not in your content marketing plan.
KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
As stated earlier, content marketing is all about attracting a targeted group of people with your content with the ultimate goal of making profits. As such, to achieve more success with your content, you’ll want to know who your audience is, so you can find out the best way to reach out to them. There are two basic ways of accessing your audience: through demographic data such as age, income, sex educational levels etc. You can make use of your Google analytics to get this information or from your Twitter analytics. The second way is to get feedback from your customers. This could be in the form of reviews and ratings of your product or services. By getting reviews, you get into your customers mind and know what they really want and how to customize your product to meet that demand.
IDENTIFY GAPS IN YOUR CONTENT
When creating content, we tend to mention important items in passing, some of which might be relevant to your customers. For instance when writing about blogging, you’ll invariably mention hosting and hosting plans; terms which newbies may find hard to understand. Those are what we call content gaps. They are the little speckles in your content that confuses your audience and lead to lost in your fan base. To better build your authority and gain more trust from your audience, it’s prudent to make every effort to bridge these content gaps or better still, link out to other helpful resources.
DECIDE ON YOUR CONTENT TYPE
Not all content are better written. Some will perform best when made into a video others as info graphics. As such, when it comes to content marketing its best that you understand the best way to present your content to maximize its impact.