From its origin as a trendy new way to promote a brand, content marketing has grown into a versatile and easily customizable strategy to reach a highly targeted audience. Businesses and organizations across all industries now utilize content marketing to build brand awareness, thought leadership and lead generation. However, it takes more than publishing a few blog posts or starting a podcast to reap the benefits. Interested in generating new engagement and traffic for your brand with a content marketing strategy? Check out these tips to leverage content marketing at its best.
Identify Your Target Audience First
Before you can ever hope to reach your target audience with high quality content, you must first get to know them and understand their needs. That means putting research before writing. This allows you to create content that deeply resonates with your target audience and generates traffic and engagement for your business. Start with customer surveys and interviews to learn more about what your audience needs, what they’re talking about and how your product or service can provide the solution.
As you gather more information about your audience, developing client personas will help you reach them with personalized content. Client personas are models that depict individuals within the larger group of your target audience. Once you understand the demographics, backgrounds, goals and purchase habits of these individuals, you can more efficiently and effectively create valuable content that generates engagement by providing answers to their most pressing questions.
Focus on Quality Content Marketing, Not Quantity
Writing or producing content without a purpose is one of the most common mistakes with content marketing. It’s often incorrectly assumed that search engines value fresh content above all else, leading to valuable time wasted churning out low quality blog posts. In reality, quality of content is much more important than quantity in the eyes of Google, so focus on the goal you want to accomplish and invest the time and energy in the content needed to help you achieve it.
Keep in mind that it’s still important to make content marketing efforts worth your time and the goal is to get as much bang for your buck as possible. Just because you have the bandwidth to write an article with Pulitzer Prize potential doesn’t necessarily mean you should. For example, you may have the time to spend countless hours crafting a long and informative whitepaper, but a series of blog posts with carefully curated and targeted keywords could provide the same value in a fraction of the time.
Repurpose Content Marketing on Social Media and Other Channels
Regardless of your industry, much of the content that you produce for any strategy can be written as evergreen content, creating the opportunity to share that content with your target audience on social media or email newsletters over and over again. This means that creating one blog, video, podcast or any other piece of content will provide opportunities for multiple related messages over time. With the tidal wave of information being published every day, sharing content just once greatly reduces the number of people you could potentially reach. Single use content also minimized your return on investment creating the content in the first place.
Even something as simple as a post on Facebook or Twitter can be reposted more than once with slightly different language, and this process can be used with all forms of content. Videos can be trimmed into smaller clips to share over several days or weeks and then again three months later. Podcast interviews can be repurposed into blog posts. Constantly reusing and evolving content is one of the keys to accomplishing your content marketing goals.
Plan To Assess, Adapt and Grow Your Content Marketing Strategy
Just because you publish and distribute high-quality content doesn’t mean your work is done. Succeeding with content marketing is a trial and error process until you accurately determine what works best for your brand and your target audience. An essential part of the process is consistently analyzing how well your content performed to determine what worked and what didn’t work.
While it’s possible to measure nearly all components of your content, including too many metrics can make measurement confusing and time consuming. Instead, focus on those that matter to your brand. Let’s say your goal is to increase audience engagement. Conversion rates and other lead generation metrics are unrelated to that goal and can make determining success more difficult. Focus instead on monitoring metrics such as social shares, comments and click-through rates. Based on these analytics, you’ll gain an even better understanding of your audience and how to engage them moving forward. And as your content marketing strategy advances, you can certainly re-assess and redefine your own goals as well.
Need help creating a content marketing strategy that reaches your audience and accomplishes your goals? As a firm grounded in public relations, we are uniquely and perfectly situated to be the go-to content creator for our clients in legal, retirement living, healthcare, retail, professional services and a range of industries. Contact Ghidotti today to learn more about how we can help you achieve measurable, exceptional results.
This is a repost of an article originally published by PRGN blog, July 26, 2021., By Natalie Ghidotti.
