Let’s talk about your Content Marketing Strategy
What is content marketing? How should you approach it? Do you need to do it?
Does your brand USP message get lost in the flurry of getting a new product or service visible to your audience? You need to ensure that you truly stand out in the crowd of competitors and entice the customer to believe in your brand enough to want to purchase.
Content Marketing Strategy
Having a robust content marketing strategy will allow you to be seen as an expert in your industry and as a result, to attract and build an audience to whom you can then market your products based on trust, understanding and brand following.
But what is Content Marketing?
Content marketing isn’t just writing articles for your website and keeping your blog up to date.
It covers all marketing that relates to any activity that delivers product or brand related messages to your current or potential customers. So well executed strategic content marketing can impact your direct customer conversions by building on your brand equity and assisting increased website and social sites traffic.
Consider the aim of your business (besides financial gain), you want to be the best in your field for example. Consider WHY you have this aim and how to communicate it, this can be in the form of blogs, social media, videos but can also be more informative documents like white papers and how to guides. You should be sure that some content communication is simply you providing free expert information, you are not always selling your product.
You should also consider reviews and testimonials and how you will communicate those publicly. You are looking to continue to build on the trust of you as a brand. You may have potential customers who want to start the relationship with you, and you will have current customers who have a relationship but want to learn about something new, what they can do to improve their business and brand as a whole. Consider your sales funnel and where each customer group sits within that funnel.
Content Calendar
Create a content calendar containing events, relevant dates, company changes to start the framework for your messaging and to ensure that campaigns work across all your mediums at a planned time. Continue to build on this throughout the year. I add to mine almost daily for things I want to consider in 6 months’ time, because by then, I may have forgotten it!
It isn’t just content – it’s culture
You need to ensure that the personality and trust you are building in comms is actually an integral part of your company culture. Especially if you plan to attend or host events – it is always really disappointing when you meet someone face to face that just doesn’t fit into the vision of the brand you have falling for from their communications.
Analysis
All this work is nothing without analysis. What worked well, what didnt work as well and why. Content Marketing is a long term gain, but worth the time and financial investment.