Let’s talk content marketing. But not the mood and tone of the content or should we post it on Facebook and LinkedIn, type of talk. Let’s talk strategy.
The internet is a noisy world. Simply having a great piece of content isn’t going to get your brand heard. The challenge is how to get your content heard above the noise. And it comes down to having to answer a simple question: Is my content marketing strategy competitive enough?
So what does a competitive content marketing strategy look like? As a matter of fact, there is no special ingredient or secret to it. It’s simply the same question as: Is my content marketing strategy comprehensive enough?
Start by taking a holistic view at your content marketing efforts and see if you’ve done some of the preliminary planning well.
Content Marketing Planning
- Brand Identity: Yes, content marketing is very closely related to branding or perhaps even the same thing altogether. Your brand identity is what will shape how your content will be created, and the direction of your core message. More importantly, it’s this pre-planning stage that determines what is it about your content that will trigger audiences to associate your product and services with certain colors, words and phrases.
- Target Audience: Audience targeting isn’t only for the media advertising world. Everything starts from the content. If you have a great strategy in place, that determines which audience segments you are going to show your ads to on Google Ads, Facebook and elsewhere…but your content and creatives do not appeal to that audience, your media budget will not convert into sales. While advertising big data is a big deal, its impact can quickly be undermined by the wrong content that gets delivered to the wrong audience at the wrong time.
Once you have your brand identity and target audience in place, you’re going to want to start drafting out a plan that covers at least these 4 core components.
Content Marketing Components
- Website: The ultimate landing for any content marketing effort come back to the website. Your website is where you have full control and say over your products and services. As such, you’re going to want to make sure the content on your website shows expertise, reliability and everything that goes with with, from contact details, to a representation of your team’s culture.
- Social Media: For every content you have carefully crafted to represent your brand, you’re going to want to distribute it across digital channels. Social media is a given here. Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and its counterparts are where all the audience are at. Come up with a distribution plan that is integrated with your content creation plan. One way to go about it is to create an integrated editorial calendar.
- SEO Search Engine Optimization: SEO and content marketing comes hand in hand. If you’re creating articles, have a think how you can leverage your content for SEO. If you’re sharing videos, make sure you’re covering trending topics and maximizing use of the title, description and tags fields. Even for infographics. If you’re able to create interactive infographics that would boost sharing of the content and utilize embedded scripts as oppose to sharing as an image, you can say that your content marketing strategy is competitive.
- Email and Outreach: Are you using your content to create new opportunities? Are you using your content for retention of existing customers? If not, it’s high time to include this into your content marketing strategy. If you’ve written a great article, it doesn’t hurt to reach out to some websites or social pages to share that content via email or message. Should they feel the content is of value, they might share to their audience which would be great for you.
And there you go.
Some simple tips to get your started and to answer the question: Is my content marketing strategy competitive?
Feel free to connect any of our experienced digital marketer to learn the ropes of content marketing planning. We also frequently host digital marketing seminars and workshops. Stay tuned for our next knowledge sharing session on How to Measure Content Marketing (Google Analytics).