If you are looking for how to develop a content marketing strategy, here are some content marketing realities that you need to be aware of.
Content marketing is constantly evolving, and you need to catch up with it constantly. In this context, this post pertains to a list of content marketing realities you really need to know.
I don’t need to stress the importance of content marketing here, with 81% shoppers doing their research online before entering a store.
It is imperative to create valuable content to engage your audience and promote your brand.
Content marketing SEO enhances brand awareness and offers you a bigger reach at a comparatively lower cost.
Also Read – 9 Ideas To Find The Right Content For Next Blog Post
It’s the choice of savvy marketers in a digital marketplace. It could be videos, blogs, emails or podcasts, but you need to do it effectively and not just differently. So now we know where we stand, what are these realities.
Some of the Content Marketing Realities and Strategies are Hard Truths and Some are Myth Busters
#1) Amazing Content
- You all want to create amazing content about your product/service. I don’t blame you, that’s what you should be aiming at. Yet, the other side of the coin is that it’s not practical to do this every day.
- Focus on how you can offer value to your customer or audience.
- Consider short videos offering tips; a short blog post or a post on social media.
- The idea is not about making people love your content or admire the language. You need to trigger reactions, engage them and make them want to share it with others. It needs to be helpful to them; it should spark a response or a debate and create a comment storm. It’s OK if everyone does not love your content; they just need to pay attention to it.
Must Read – Well Written Content Can Do Wonders for Your Blog / Website
#2) Quantity of Content Marketing
- Many renowned sites like TechCrunch and Mashable offer content on a daily basis. It results in generating more visitors for the site. But this doesn’t mean you have to follow suit and dish out tons of content every day.
- Give precedence to quality over quantity.
- Check out Wise Geek with tons of content. It was penalized by Panda due to reduced quality content.
- The longer the content, the better the results – do you seriously believe this? You can attract millions of targeted audience with a 100-word post and even make use of all those keywords within it. The emphasis is on quality not quantity, so find a good mix.
Also Read – Benefits of Focusing on Long Tail Keywords
#3) Sharing Your Content
- It’s important that your content creates twitches in the social media for successful content marketing.
- Promote content actively to your target audience.
- Promote social posts for effective content marketing strategy.
- Share content in communities where the target audience hangs out, including Quora.
Related – Social Media Sharing Tools for Marketers & Bloggers
#4) Buyer Data for Best Content Marketing Strategies
- Before you create content, create ‘buyer persona’, which is data about your prospective customers and their behavior.
- It helps you create better, targeted content and improves your content marketing techniques.
- Create a buyer persona by asking yourself:
- Who are your ideal customers.
- What information interests them?
- How can you solve their problems through your content marketing strategy?
- What information are they looking for?
- It will make your content market campaigning more successful. 56% companies were able to generate better quality of leads with the use of buyer personas.
#5) Focusing on Clients
- You can provide a high quality of content marketing if you know more about your clients.
- Look out for clues using website analytics, such as keyword performance; user behavior; bounce rates.
- Search for them on social media and collect data. This is where they hang out and discuss their problems.
- Perform surveys and conduct research on your product/service to get more insights.
- Survey customers. Ask them for suggestions and improvements. No one can give you better feedback.
#6) The Correct Formula
- You’re lucky there’s a winning formula for content marketing.
- Combine your marketing message with what your targeted audience actually needs. Keep customers in mind.
- Think of the type of content that would work best: videos; visuals; infographics. Also think of platforms that you could share it on to get a wider reach.
- Combine original content with curated ones from the Internet. It results in better quality of information.
- Add links, resources, but see to it that you offer due credit to the sources. Helps in increasing loyalty and trust from customers.
- Create editorial calendars for tracking team workflow and publishing. It can contain:
- Date of publishing content
- Title of content
- Author’s name
- Status of the content and so on
- Make it SEO rich, but don’t overdo it for obvious reasons
#7) Augmented Reality
Source
- Content need not necessarily be in the written word alone.
- Use AR technology for videos, texts and images, infographics, PDFs. You will remember how Pokémon GO took over the entire planet last year and how people went crazy about it.
- It’s more than a gimmick and can give your brand an edge over the competition.
- Use AR in an engaging way, as the technology offers great potential for delivering content in a unique fashion.
- Yelp is a great example of a business using AR to add value. Yelp collects reviews and suggestions for shopping, entertainment and so on from users. The Monocle feature of Yelp displays the review and the camera points to the venue, so that users can make informed decisions.
#8) Integration of Platforms
- Use social media platforms like Facebook as a honeypot where users can access your content without even leaving the application.
- Use smart chat bots and integrate your shopping features to get full benefits of the app functionality.
- Allow a good budget for major platform integration. Think Apple News, Facebook Instant. Users will consume content and do their shopping from the same content.
- It’s an expanding ecosystem.
Over to You
Content marketing works wonders. There are no two opinions on that. But you need to be realistic and use the right strategy.
Quality over quantity is of paramount importance. The information you provide your audience should be useful, but it should be offered via channels that are compatible with their habits.
You don’t have to attach many strings to your bow, but choose the correct string, so that the content ends up being most beneficial to your business.
Before you commit to any approach, consider what you want to achieve, whom you wish to target.