You’ve probably read about, or witnessed (even if not firsthand) how content marketing can make brands successful. And when it comes to growth, customer acquisition and brand building, content marketing seems to be the most consistent winner. However, given the rate at which content marketing is sung and chanted around, you’d be disappointed to find that a lot of marketers still are not successful at it.
While some of the major issues most companies face when content marketing is involved includes leadership, content ideas and lack of content creation resources. The latter being the biggest challenge of all, according to findings from Adobe’s CMO.com.
If you’re among those who are already using content marketing as a growth strategy, or are already considering how to start implementing a content marketing strategy, I guess you must be interested in how to become successful at it. Without wasting much time, let’s examine five content marketing secrets that can boost the performance of your strategy.
Secret #1. Be Authentic
Authenticity is one of the main ingredients of success any content marketer can rely on for success. Whereas, it’s the most lacking in the content most marketers produce. One can easily see why authenticity is suffering in the content marketing world: the sheer amount of content available.
It’s easy for a marketer to get overwhelmed by the type and size of content s/he is surrounded with that they find it hard to come up with something original.
The need for authenticity in content marketing is so important. Joe Pulizzi rounded up the main take away from tips and anecdotes on content marketing from several experts into two words: Be Authentic.
Whether your content marketing strategy is producing the desired results or not can be judged by how authentic your content is.
Consumers will easily resonate with high quality original content over half-thought content that feels like what they can easily come across elsewhere.
Secret #2. Blog, Blog and Blog Some More
Are you still pushing the decision to start a company blog to sometime in the future? Perhaps, you’re unsure if it’s even worth the try at all. According to stats from Hubspot, businesses that include blogging in their content marketing strategy are able to acquire more customers than their counterparts who do not.
Blogging can help your overall marketing effort when it is incorporated into your content marketing strategy.
When blogging is mentioned, the most prominent benefit most marketers associate with it is SEO. Sure blogging is great for SEO, but it can also offer several other benefits that can add real value to your bottom-line. Some of those benefits include:
- Authority building: brands can also become experts when insider tips and expert opinions are covered on the company’s blog. Consumers will become aware of a culture of expertise within the company and will grow to see the brand as an authority.
- Establish trust: trust is a very important factor in a business-customer relationship, and blogging is just about the best tool fit to keep your customers trusting your brand.
- Build credibility: just like trust, credibility can also be built by consistently offering your consumers valuable content through a regularly updated blog. We all know that credibility and trust are factors that can help secure customer loyalty.
- Acquired new customers: companies that blog have acquired new customers through their corporate blog.
Secret #3. Create a Content Marketing Plan
Planning content marketing can help you prevent some of the most common headaches marketers run into with their content marketing strategy. When you fail to plan your content marketing, issues that were mentioned in the opening of this blog post is what you’re most likely to face: running out of content ideas, leadership issues and worst of all not having resources to manage your content campaign.
To ensure your content marketing is set up for success from the onset, begin with a plan that will cover every aspect of your content marketing efforts. This should include a content marketing documentation approach as well.
In order to come up with a content marketing plan that won’t end up being too faux to work, you should consider implementing the following into your plan:
- Your content schedule: this document or guideline will serve as a roaster of what type of content you put out and when. For your blog, for instance, you should design a content schedule that outlines when you’re going to publish detailed long-form content or simple short, easy to digest content.
- Finances: part of your content marketing plan should cover how you intend to allocate resources to your content marketing campaign. This is particularly important so as to avoid running over the budget, which usually creates bigger problems.
- Role: also, your content marketing plan should give room to what role each participant in the company will be playing to advance your overall content marketing goals. This will bring about the effectiveness needed to ensure that no one is lagging behind in any areas.
- Goals: finally on this list, but definitely not your last, is your goals. Including your goals in the plan will help keep everyone in line and make sure you’re on the same page with everybody. Putting your goals in the content marketing plan will also give you a direction of how your efforts are playing out and where you might need to revisit.
Secret #4. Collaborate
Should content marketing be done in silo? Definitely not. Content marketing should be done with collaboration in mind, both internally and externally.
Internally, everyone in the organization should be aware of the content marketing strategy and should be able to make a contribution to its success. Blogging for instance should not be done by just one person. The CEO, CMO and other executives and major members in the company should collaborate to create content regularly.
Externally, your company could consider partnering up with other brands that are not direct competitors to leverage your audience and content assets.
Collaborating to create content can help keep the company afloat whilst minimizing the cost or resources content marketing demands.
Secret #5. Create a Content Culture
Finally content marketing should be the culture of the brand. This means your company has to be consistent with its content marketing approach.
The blog and social media outlets and your other content sharing platforms should be regularly fed with relevant content that can keep your readers/viewers engaged at all time.
Avoid implementing content marketing plans that feel half-minded as they won’t drive tangible results.
What other content marketing secrets do you think will contribute to content marketing success? Share your ideas with me in the comment comment section.
Image Credit: Joethegoatfarmer.com
