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Tips for creating an effective content marketing strategy

by | Mar 28, 2018 | Analysis, Public Relations

Content marketing is the process of creating blog posts or social media posts that are thoughtful and well-written. As opposed to blanket advertising, content marketing provides targeted customers with information they may be seeking in exchange for exposure to a particular site or brand.

This style of marketing has been seen everywhere from newspapers to online journals. In the last few years it has become the number one option for reaching as many customers as possible and in the best way. Content marketing relies on good writing and a keen knowledge of your company’s brand to deliver quality writing that speaks to the target audience. In this day and age, consumers are a bit savvier and can detect blatant marketing.

This means that your brand building efforts must be herculean and sincere so that your audience does not feel exploited in any way. In this article, we hope to elucidate methods that will improve your content marketing so that you can appeal to your audience in a better and more efficient way.

One of the most important things for any marketer to do is to formulate a content strategy

This can take on many forms, from a manifesto to a memo. This is an integral step towards making a cohesive and unified marketing strategy that will accurately target your audience and yield great results. The specific strategy you use is up to your discretion but, should take into account your industry and model. There are a number of useful resources online that accurately and cleanly detail what it takes to make the best content strategy possible.

It is imperative that your strategy takes into account all forms of media and communication with the public. There is no better way to formulate a strategy than to meet with your colleagues and come up with an effective plan that utilizes your team’s point of view. Once a content strategy has been implemented, it is up to you to keep everyone informed at all times. To that end, there are a number of applications that use instant messaging to keep your entire team updated at all times. Applications like Slack can keep your team informed and efficient by creating of flow of constant communication.

There is then the issue of how to distribute your content

This is an integral part of any content marketing strategy and requires massive amounts of research to truly understand which avenue will suit you the best. However, there are a few tried-and-true methods that typically yield positive results. The first is by creating a press release which will push your content out to legitimate news sites and get it seen by people all over the country. Then there is the ever imperative blog.

Making a blog for your company’s website is a completely necessary step in pushing your content out to the web. An effective blog is updated at least once a week and has information that people from all industries will find to be helpful. The trick to this, of course, is creating a blog that uses answers that only you can give. Simply, you must create the question in one blog and answer that same question in a different blog. This strategy, mixed with backlinking, can yield an impressive amount of page views. This leads us into the metrics conversation about how you will judge the performance of your content.

There are a few ways to do this, such as referencing and page views. Marketing strategies call for a mix of metrics, but, a primary indicator of exposure is the page view. There is nothing more important than people going to your website and reading a blog post. This is how you get the highest conversion rate along with general traffic. Content marketing has the primary goal of attracting potential customers and keeping them there with quality content.

Finally, your strategy should have a method by which it measures return on investment

This can be measured in a number of ways, but, the most universal way is by calculating the conversion rate. This can be done by counting the page views and the number of conversions which then will calculate what percentage of visitors are enticed by the products or services your business creates.

Once it is firmly established how you will measure success then the success can begin to proliferate. Using the standard conversion rate is a metric that everyone can understand and that also yields real and tangible results. If you cannot determine a satisfactory return on investment then there is no point in making a content strategy at all. That is why it is absolutely imperative that there is a metric by which you can measure success and business growth. The point of content marketing, in its entirety, is return on investment. Strategizing well will lead to great results for you and your business.

Tania Brooks
Tania Brooks is a business journalist with a focus on emerging technologies and emerging markets. She used to work as an overseas operations coordinator for Unilever. You may contact her on Twitter.

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