Before you dive into business as usual in the new year, take the time to map out a content marketing strategy that identifies new insights and inspirations that improve upon last year’s results.
According to Content Marketing Institute, 37% of business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers have a documented content marketing strategy, and 61% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers meet daily or weekly with their content marketing team. That being said, come up with a content marketing strategy that works for your organization, get clear about what a successful program looks like, and document your strategy to increase its effectiveness.
Here are some ways to improve your content marketing strategy.
Engage Your Audience
Engagement is a common word we hear in the inbound marketing world. It’s important to recognize the significance of the engagement you’re having with your prospects and clients through various social media platforms. Your audience is not only absorbing the content you feed to them, some are actively participating and making their voices heard. It’s important to pay close attention to the conversations happening, and find ways to engage with them that will positively impact your relationship with them.
Consider More Than Just A Blog
With the rise of creative content marketing efforts, you can’t rely solely on blogging to engage your clients. Between E-books, video blogs, interactive content (such as quizzes), webinars and podcasts, there are many productive ways to add content into your strategy.
Always Keep Your Brand’s Story In Mind
All content should reflect your business’s brand story whether you’re writing a blog post, sharing the latest company news in a newsletter, or blasting out a video blog. Every piece of content should exemplify key branding principles that remain consistent to your brand’s story. As consumers are jumping from one channel to the next, it’s critical to present consistent messaging across all channels in varying content forms.
Choose Your Channels Wisely
The key ingredient to gaining the right exposure and grasping the attention of your client base and prospective client, is to find the right channel to disseminate this information. Instead of blasting out all content on every social media platform, ask yourself where your ideal prospects are spending the most time. You’ll find out more about your buyer’s persona by taking the time to engage with your audience on the most popular social media platforms and as a result increase the likelihood of working with them.
Cross-Channel Market Your Content Online
Cross channel marketing, otherwise known as multi-channel marketing or omni-channel marketing is the engagement of your customer or prospect across every digital channel or digital device. As prospects go through their day bouncing from one device to the next, you want to be able to track and monitor their actions, movements, and data over all channels and platforms. With the advent of smarter tracking tools, marketers can start learning more about their audience by analyzing the data results of each marketing campaign.
Measure Results
The likelihood of creating a perfect formula for reaching your content marketing goals is only possible with the help of important measuring tools. By evaluating the effectiveness of your content marketing on all channels, you can improve your results. Some of the best tools for digital marketing measurement are: HubSpot (helps you identify page views, followers, or social shares), Moz (tracks SEO and Facebook audience insights), Google Analytics (for tracking websites), and Hootsuite (for overall social media analytics).
Going blindly into 2016 without a content marketing strategy is not advisable if you’re looking to improve upon last year’s data. Instead, create some realistic goals that can be easily measured monthly, quarterly, and yearly with your team. By measuring the performance goals, you’ll be able to tweak the outcome of your content marketing strategy and start to see an overall shift in ROI.
Want to learn more about creating buyer personas? Read our free e-book, How to Create Buyer Personas.
