Are you aware that over 2 million posts are published on blogs every single day? According to Worldometers, the numbers are right. That is a tremendous amount of content to sort through as a user looking for information.
Therefore, planning your content with a comprehensive and formulaic strategy is crucial to being able to cut through the abundance of poor quality information available. Thus, thinking about the end goal of what you are looking to achieve with the posts you are publishing is key.
Regardless of your end goal, you want to clearly define your content strategy to really formulate the right approach.
Setting Up Your Digital Content Marketing Strategy For Better Success
Firstly, let’s start with the basics. While you might already be aware of these tips, it is still worth mentioning in order to ensure that the strategy of your foundation is rock solid.
Clearly Define Your Goals
You want to be certain that each post you make is being crafted with an end goal in mind. You want to do this to ensure that you are really executing on a strategy and taking incremental steps towards achieving the end goal with it. You should look to layout your company’s pre-defined goals for the year prior to creating any type of content. For every company, increasing profits is likely the main goal. However, you also want to consider smaller goals such as expanding into a brand new market, releasing a new product or service, or even reaching a brand new audience. Figuring out your goals is crucial to developing a well thought out and well-executed content marketing strategy. Once you know what it is you are looking to achieve with your content efforts, you can really formulate the right marketing strategy.
Identify Your Market
You want to be certain that you are completely aware of your target customer. If you are releasing a brand new product this year, you want to know exactly who you want to target. You want to figure out who your ideal customer is and figure out whether or not they are different from current users. Figure out what makes your target customer different and look to conduct research to ensure that you fully understand these respective buyers. That way, you will be able to figure out what resonates with them and what kind of content they really engage and identify best with. Figuring out if your target customer would rather read an article or watch a video is a key to getting higher levels of engagement and conversions. Figuring out what social media channels they prefer is another major key point.
Develop Your Content Marketing Plan
Once you are completely aware of where you should be actively posting and marketing, you will be able to plan the content accordingly. You want to know exactly where you will be posting the content because some types of content will inherently perform better on certain platforms. With this plan, you want to be sure to include various things including where you are going to be publishing the content, how often you will be publishing, what types of content you will be publishing, and how you will be tracking the success of each post. Once you have clearly defined the basics of your plan, you will be able to install some of the secrets discussed below to really have your content marketing strategy take flight.
1. Social Media Stories
Are you wondering whether or not your audience is going to be intrigued by a social media story? You shouldn’t be afraid to try new things. A lot of brands are using social media in various and much more creative ways than ever before. They are incorporating this strategy into their content marketing efforts. While the concept has really become an integral component of an effective B2C content marketing strategy, it is even helping B2B companies do things like showcase their team members, introduce new products, showcase case studies, and more.
2. Have A Rewards Program
Just about everyone enjoys being rewarded for making purchases. Because of this, you want to be sure that you are implementing some form of this in your business. The incentive to get something for free because you are a loyal customer can really keep your customers engaged and coming back for more. You can do this in every industry no matter if you are B2B or B2C.
Establishing some sort of referral program is one of the best things that you can do to effectively retain more customers in the B2B sector. This is a very good option for the B2B industry because the sales cycles are generally much longer. Being able to retain customers in this type of industry is much more valuable because the value of each customer and sale is generally a lot higher.
3. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is easily one of the newer additions to the list, but it is extremely effective. The idea of this is to use someone that has gained the trust of a specific market that you are trying to reach and having them promote or sell your product. It can have a positive impact on brand trust and brand awareness that you are able to achieve. Because they have already established trust with their own respective audience, you can generally expect high conversions from this type of marketing.
It is different from celebrities and having them endorse your product because you are using much more ‘niche down’ influencers with a specific audience and a much more personal relationship with their respective audience. Therefore, it feels much more authentic than a celebrity endorsement. Using influencers is a great way to really add a significant level of engagement that is much more effective for reaching your target market than simply publishing content.
4. Native Advertising
This isn’t necessarily new to an effective content marketing strategy, but it is something that is quickly gaining steam.
The key to success with this is to be much more strategic and selective when you are partnering with companies to ensure that you are able to create authentic and meaningful content.
5. Knowing When To Email Or Not
Knowing when your emails should be sent out is crucial to having success with it. You want to not only segment your market for your email campaigns, but you also want to ensure that you are adding significant value with each email.
Future Of Digital Content Marketing
When crafting content, you want to test new methods and really figure out what works best for your specific audience. By factoring in metrics, you should be able to tell what is working and what isn’t. This will allow you to really be able to come up with the most effective comprehensive strategy for your business.
