As you no doubt realize from the amount of information available about the importance of content marketing in this day and age, it is imperative for business owners and managers to post regular content. Blog posts, articles, e-books, social media posts, e-newsletters, and the like are important for all organizations who want to source new leads, increase conversions, enjoy more repeat business, and get lots of referrals.
Try These Content Marketing Tips This Year
If you’re like many people though, your content marketing might be a bit hit and miss. You might get really motivated and post regularly for a month, and then find that all those everyday tasks you have to do end up taking priority and content gets pushed to the backburner. Or perhaps you are posting regularly and consistently, but just aren’t enjoying the results you’d like to achieve.
Follow these tips to create a great content marketing strategy in 2017
If you resonate with these ideas, you will find things will get better and easier if you take the time to develop a proper content marketing plan sooner rather than later. If this is one of your objectives for 2017, read on for some great content marketing tips for 2017 that you can follow right now.
Know Your Content Marketing Objectives
The first step you need to complete when creating a content marketing plan is working out what you’re trying to accomplish from your content. What do you want the content to do for your business? Are you looking, for example:
- To create more brand awareness
- To establish you or your company’s position as an industry expert
- To generate more leads
- To improve your search engine rankings
- To increase customer loyalty and retention rates
- To improve conversions
It helps if you are specific here, as this will give you more concrete goals to chase after, plus it will make it easier to measure your success later on. As well, if you are very clear about what your mission is for your content before you develop your plan, you will determine your strategy much more quickly.
If you want to achieve a number of different things from your content marketing, you should set some priorities. It is best to choose the top three items and put them in order of importance. This will then help you to tailor your content marketing strategies accordingly.
Understand What Your Business Does Differently
Next, before you or your team write any content, you should also have a good understanding of what it is that your business does differently to your competitors. With so much information being thrown at consumers day and night, and with so many companies focusing on content, it can be incredibly challenging to make your content stand out.
There is no doubt that making fresh content stand out can be a real challenge for content authors
What will help you with this is knowing the one main thing that sets your business apart from others. If you feel stuck on this, take a look at the competition to see what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
Furthermore analyze the tone of voice and style used in their content marketing strategies, and think about how your content marketing techniques might differ (just make sure that your content is created in a way that is in accordance with the overall branding of the business).
Be Clear About Your Target Audience
It is also necessary to really be clear about who your target audience is for your content, and what it is they’re looking for. For starters, define your audience by creating buyer personas. These personas (you may have a few if you are targeting various groups for different products/services or in different ways) should include details such as the likely income level, lifestyle, family status, and shopping habits of the ideal customer.
Understanding who you are targeting will help you to know:
- What type of language and style to use in your content
- Where to place it
- What information to focus on
- And much more
All of these details will help you to produce content that is relevant and valuable to your audience, and thereby more successful.
Develop a Content Marketing Execution Strategy
Once you have all the relevant information about the people you want to target with your content marketing on hand, you can start to develop an execution strategy. You will need to pick the type of content to produce.
The list of options is long, and includes blogs, webinars, infographics, surveys, videos, product updates, case studies, how-to articles, e-books, guides, interviews, custom illustrations and other graphics, industry news updates, Q&A sessions, and so on.
Most businesses find it helpful to create content in a variety of forms and lengths. This will help you cater to different touch points (such as on social media sites, various advertising platforms, websites, in-store, and so on) and will give you a mixture of evergreen content that is useful year around, as well as news-worthy content that plugs in to relevant trends or events.