How to place content marketing strategically?
If your goal is to grow your business and get more attention, more leads, more clicks and more clients, more customers, and more sales. Content marketing is the answer.
It is a reality. Content marketing is one of the most effective methods of marketing viable today.
Your content is the spine of the whole customer journey, the full buying process that someone goes by when they first heard about you until converting into a loyal paying customer.
When it comes to marketing, everything is content.
Your ads, your content video, your email series…
Now!
Do you have content marketing that is working, but you saw many other examples in your niche where content is working way better (so you understand it could be working better for you as well)?
Do you already have content that is not delivering the outcomes you expected?
Are you planning to begin your content marketing right now?
Then you need to be aware of 2 facts!
- Content marketing, like SEO, I would say, presents a major issue today: it’s overwhelming.
There are so many different tools, strategies, tactics.
From vlogging to blogging, from social media to podcasting. And these examples are just a few of many.
- Content marketing might be confusing.
Content marketing comes with its collection of implicit or unwritten rules that most people aren’t aware of.
And by not comprehending these rules perfectly, the content is destined to be ignored.
But Content Marketing is a reality. Whether you’re a business owner and entrepreneur or a marketing, content marketing works.
Let me share some of the most influential content marketing strategies and essential marketing principles that you need to know if you desire your content marketing to start succeeding.
Quality Content
Quality content is no longer enough.
Why?
If you are in business, I am sure you heard this: ”all you need to succeed with content marketing is to publish high-quality content consistently”.
Everybody is saying it all the time! Right?
When most people discover this, they realize that it makes sense that you want your content marketing to succeed, so it reasonably needs to be half-decent, at minimum.
But where most people fail to understand properly is the ”consistent” part.
The biggest problem with content marketing is that it takes energy, time, and effort!
If this was not enough, many people also approach it with insanely high expectations and a level of perfectionism. They think every creation has to be the next great Netflix reality show.
The reality is that nothing could be further from reality.
Excessively shining and overly promotional fancy content can often perform much worse.
Why? Because looking polished and excessively professional, the content fails to look ”Authentic” (I use capital A because you must understand this).
It is hard for everybody to admit this, but you probably need to lower the bar when creating content unless you have an entire team dedicated to filming and production!
Today, most smartphones have some pretty incredible cameras shooting 4k, which is way beyond what you need for a decent YouTube video!
Plus, some of the most effective kinds of content working right now are shorter forms of content around 30 seconds, 60 seconds. You watch them every single day on Instagram, on Facebook stories, on YouTube shorts.
Don’t lie. You do!
I mean, if you want to start some guerilla-style marketing, grabbing your phone and chatting with people, there’s nothing better and nothing easier to look authentic and engaging.
Again, if you are craving to reveal the ”behind the scenes” of everything going on in your world, there is nothing better than short video content.
I am talking about creating important and relatable content specific to the target market you seek to work with and detailed to develop authority and expertise.
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Quantity and Consistency
You want to create more content, and this means correcting your consistency.
If you’re currently creating one piece of content, trying to make it once a week, once a week, try for two to three times. And if you’re doing two or three times a week and having half-decent success, maybe bump it up to four or five, six or even seven.
Well, creating a YouTube video a day can be demanding. But shooting a couple of Instagram Stories takes about 60 seconds. So you need to select the channels you can tackle easily and expand from there, with no excuse to create more content.
Creating content that your audience wants to see!
You see, one of the most significant causes that most content marketing flops to drive measurable results is that it is created with the content author in mind, not the audience.
It happens when you are creating the content you want to create instead of trying to get into the minds of your customers.
When you can be more empathetic and understand where your customers are coming from, their problems and frustrations, you can create extremely relevant and valuable content to help them and solve those issues, at the very least, bringing some relief.
There are also two more problems with creating selfish content:
- Nobody is looking for it. Because it’s not addressing a problem they have.
- If your customers stumble across it, well, it’s not going to be relevant, so they won’t care about it.
Creating truly effective content
Your content needs to be specific.
By this, I do not mean always niching down and creating just longtail keywords content.
PS> you can find many explanations of this in my SEO articles.
By this, I mean you need to be sure the content you are creating is specific to a concern or a problem, an objection that your intended audience has.
Going very broad with content marketing is a strategy that might work only with enormous multi-million dollar budgets for branding. Going very broad does not turn well when getting into smaller businesses.
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The takeaway is that you need to be more strategic and specific.
If you’re planning and producing content just because someone told you to, the results are going to be very poor!.
Keep in mind who you are creating content for, your content strategy goals, what messages will be in it, and what media choices to design around it?
Where are you going to promote it?
How are you going to promote it?
These are all aspects of crafting an amazingly effective content strategy.
Take a moment before you build that next piece of content. Make sure that it is the best piece of content for the targeted people!
Craft the right things, in the right place, for the right people.
Content alignment:
Your ideal customer avatar
Your target market is the people you desire to reach. These are your right people, the content message itself, including the hook and the title, and all of the content and angles, statements and facts, and everything you can add to this thing.
The media aspect of it is where you select to distribute or promote this content, whether you place it on your website and blog, on video, on an email flow, on social media.
The key here is to make sure that all of these are in alignment, and when you have the right marketing and messaging media in alignment, you’re doing the right things in the right place with the right people.
That’s when your marketing and your content specifically really start to play.
The best platform for you? Well, you can answer this for yourself in just a minute.
A few questions will help you to have a clear picture:
What channels and media your ideal target market love, where are they more active?
For example, if you know that your best customers are currently enjoying a lot of Instagram and YouTube, ignore everything else and focus on making a strategy for content marketing on those media.
No matter what other marketers tell you, if your people aren’t there, do not go there!
Enjoy creating your content!
Estimate where your ideal target market is active, then decide what sort of content you desire to create.
For example:
If you hate writing, you want to avoid a text-based content strategy. If you think your voice sounds well, then obviously, you’re going to want to focus on audio, and if the thought of being on camera shocks you, then positively, stay away from the video strategy. A text-based marketing strategy might be good for you!
Content marketing with a Blog or through email is still one of the most powerful and effective ways to grow your authority, establish rapport, build connection.
Find a way to create content consistently in a way that you don’t hate.
The key takeaway here!
Marketing is all about the delivery of value to your customer.
- Marketing is being empathetic.
- Marketing is placing yourself in your client’s position.
- Marketing is reckoning their pains and frustrations.
- Marketing is reckoning how your business is uniquely placed to resolve your client’s problems.
- Marketing is demonstrating that value, going where your customers are, guiding them through a journey with content, leading them to the logical conclusion that your business is the best solution for their problem.
That is marketing, and that requires content.
