It’s no secret that many businesses find content marketing difficult. After all, it is rather challenging due to the number of assets—like blogs, social media and email marketing, to name a few—that must come together under one over arching content strategy. But therein lays the problem that’s keeping many companies away from content marketing success: Strategy.
In fact, a survey conducted by Smart Insights revealed that 56 percent of respondents said that they are actively using content marketing but they don’t have a defined strategy in place. This is rather concerning because without a clear set of guidelines how can marketers understand if they are reaching their content marketing goals?
Producing content without a strategy is like getting dressed with your eyes closed—the results will be unpredictable. What’s more, this is most likely the reason why many businesses struggle with successfully implementing content marketing campaigns. After all, posting to your blog once every two weeks, posting to your Twitter account once per week or sending email marketing messages that relay the same content month after month will only prove to be a waste of your marketing department’s time and resources, as a “plan” like this doesn’t actively engage your audience in the same way you would be able to with a documented strategy in place.
So if you’re struggling to succeed with your content but don’t know where to being drawing up an effective strategy, here are a few pointers:
- Let customer data pave the way: First things first, you need to garner actionable insights about your consumers before you can create content that will effectively engage them. And this doesn’t mean just their age and industry, this means learning information such as company size, budget, location, and historical buying behavior. In order to produce the most targeted content you need a 360-degree view of your buyer.
- Target, personalize, and repeat: The key to permeating your target audience weighs heavily on how laser focused you can make your content. For example, when you use the aforementioned pieces of data, you can create blogs that specifically reference “Five Ways To Avoid This Particular Pain Point.” What’s more, you can leverage geographical information in your email marketing and social media, especially if you are a local business, to hyper-focus on one audience or another. Let your customers know you are local and expand on this detail, as it will make them feel more connected to your brand.
- Get help from content experts: Crafting compelling content takes dedication and a significant amount of a marketer’s day. Therefore, not every business’s marketing department will have the internal resources it takes to deliver the multitude of blogs, social posts, emails, case studies and more that it takes to be a content marketing champion. In these cases, companies must include outsourced marketing in their strategy to ensure they don’t end up suffering from marketing burnout. Additionally, it’s helpful to have a third-party perspective on your industry, as you might realize new angels for stories that you would have never created if left to your own devices.
So don’t press another letter on your keyboard unless it’s to draft your content marketing strategy document. And if you need a push in the right direction don’t forget to heed these tips.
