If you’re looking to supercharge your content marketing in 2019, welcome to the party. With a sound content marketing plan followed by great execution, you can raise your business profile, increase sales and build a strong customer base around your brand. And these are just some of the benefits.
However, the success of your content marketing efforts requires an ongoing amount of input. This comes in the form of the components or ingredients that have to be present for the desired results.
In this post I’ll share 11 of the most important ingredients for a successful outcome:
1. Content marketing strategy
A content marketing strategy is a plan that describes your content marketing goals and how you intend to reach them. As Content Marketing Institute puts it, it demonstrates “why you’re creating content, who you’re helping and how you’ll help them in a way no one else can.”
To get the most out of it, successful marketers document their strategy. This helps them feel much less challenged by the campaign, justify their spending and have a higher chance of success.
Here’s how to develop a sound e-commerce content marketing strategy.
2. Content calendar
A content calendar is used to plan, schedule and organize content over a period of time. It helps your campaign in three major ways: Keeping you organized; ensuring content is published, distributed and promoted in time; and boosting your productivity.
If you don’t keep a content calendar, it’s easy to lose track of your mission, lowering your chances of success. When I help clients with their content calendar, one of my goals is to create a system that ensures it’s effectively implemented.
Do you want to come up with the right content ideas to grow your marketing efforts? Reach out to me and let me help you create a winning content calendar.
3. Content creators
Without a doubt, you need content creators. This can either be you or someone else. When I was getting started, I created all my blog content myself. However, as the business grew, I realized that I couldn’t keep up with the needs of my audience. I started outsourcing and invited guest bloggers.
If you can’t do it either for lack of time or sufficient skill, it’s better to outsource this part of your strategy. It’s only fair to the audience, which expects high-quality and relevant content from you. Besides, outsourcing allows you to focus on what you can really do.
4. Goals
Every piece of content that you send out must be guided by specific goals which are in line with the content strategy. I’m convinced that producing content without specific goals does very little, if anything at all, for your business. Worse still, it might harm your brand.
Your content marketing strategy lets you know where every piece of content fits and at what point you should publish it. Broadly, some of the reasons to produce content include: To earn links, rank well, drive engagement and educate the audience.
5. Distribution and promotion
Distribution and promotion deal with getting your content before the eyes of the audience. This ingredient is important for one simple reason: If they don’t see it, they can’t gain from it.
It’s the strategic placement of your content to ensure that the audience sees and engages with it. Promotion employs paid and organic techniques such as PPC advertising, influencer marketing, social media, and email to boost distribution.
6. The brand
Your content marketing strategy must include the brand element at every step. From the message delivered on each piece of content to the font styles and visuals, every bit should be consistent with your brand. This helps you create a solid identity with your audience.
7. The audience persona
A persona is a profile that represents a similar group of people in your target audience. You might have a specific target audience but this doesn’t put them all in a single box of needs. Creating audience personas helps you segment the audience by different factors such as demographics, preferences, job description, etc. Here’s how to create targeted content using buyer personas.
8. Keyword strategy
Keywords are the SEO signal that a particular type of subject is popular with their target audience. While you may have the needs of your audience at heart, you can’t always tell the type of information they will find relevant without doing keyword research.
A content marketing keyword strategy puts together all the findings of your research in an organized fashion to help you create content that both you and the audience will find extremely useful.
9. Variety
Variety cures monotony. By mixing different types of content in your strategy, you can make sure your audience is never bored by the same type of content every time.
But it’s not just for the sake of mixing up your content. From your audience personas, you’ll see that different segments of the audience have different preferences about how they consume their content: Video, audio, visual and written. If you set out to cater to each of these groups, you’ll inevitably end up with a diverse content strategy.
10. Authenticity
Consumers want to associate with brands that are truthful, genuine and reliable. This is the essence of authentic marketing. Smaller brands can start by using an efficient content marketing strategy to build thought-leadership, thereby building brand authenticity.
In the content marketing perspective, being authentic means staying true to the original goal of content marketing: To provide value to the audience instead of trying to sell to them.
11. Performance measurement
You can’t spell success without measurement. Measuring the performance of your content marketing campaign helps you understand how you’re doing and when to adjust.
Before you even begin creating content, you should have a clear picture of what success looks like. This is determined by the use of KPIs.
Here’s a guide to help you determine the KPIs to track.
Conclusion
Top of it all is time. Successful brands take a long-game approach to content marketing. How long? At least 6 months. Some have to go for more than a year before they can attribute any considerable growth to these efforts. To know the ingredients and understand that it takes time to apply them is the beginning of content marketing success.