Your exclusive content marketing strategy to make your business grow

Have you ever been told that there is a formula for successful content marketing? If yes, shun the thought of anything such! Because it is probably the worst ever piece of advice you ever received. On the contrary, there is nothing such as one-size-fits-all when it comes to content marketing strategy.

In other words, there is an exclusive strategy for content marketing which would work only for your business and no one else’s. Are you sure about that particular content marketing idea that might work only for you and can essentially take your business rocket high?

‘Meet’ content writing as the jigsaw puzzle that fits perfectly with your marketing plan!

Let’s face the fact that content marketing is certainly not the new thing here as a marketing strategy. It’s been long since content is treated the king! However, ironically enough, there is a lot of confusion over what it is and how it works.

To define it the best way –

“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach which is focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the main aim to attract and to retain a clearly-defined audience. The ultimate aim to define your industry specific content strategy is to drive profitable customer action.”

Things to keep in mind while talking about content marketing

• Content marketing needs strategies, and adequate planning: We need to keep in mind that it takes properly documented content marketing strategy as the key to make your strategies stand out from those of their less-effective peers.

• Content marketing includes both the creation and the distribution of content: Creation of content doesn’t end your job, it just paves the way for a strict marketing need in the professional way.

• Content must be relevant and valuable: Content works when it is not spammy or farm-generated. Infact, content should be informative but not just pitchy.

• Content marketing is consistently delivered: Content marketing has to be a consistent process and no one-off pieces of content counts, nor do campaigns with a finite duration. This is a tough job to do, as success doesn’t come overnight.

• Audience targeted and retaining: Your content marketing must be intended to attract and to retain an audience for the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer action. There must be a specific way to reach your key business goal(s).

• Audience must be segregated and defined well: It is suggested to focus your content on reaching a particular audience target or niche, and hence it is a must to clearly define your audience, keeping in mind everything that you are creating and for those you are creating them.

Why is content marketing a “marketing”?

Content marketing is not a standalone marketing technique that can survive and float in vacuum. It is, in fact the right catalyst that’s needed to be integrated into your overarching marketing plan. If done the right way, content marketing is guaranteed to strengthen all your other marketing efforts.

Formula system doesn’t work in content marketing

It is evidently proved that a brand with a strong online and social media presence is obvious to get more sales through its ecommerce site rather than its brick-and-mortar store. On the contrary, the rival brand is relatively less active online but garners more offline sales.  Now the question arises if both the brands follow the same content formula, keeping in mind they belong to the same industry?

Absolutely not.

However, more often than not, this is what takes place. Brands often go for some pre-set formula and hope to taste success with content marketing. And no prize for guessing that these brands fail badly even before they get a chance to implement the strategy to its fullest.

While a content marketing “formula” may let your brand taste one accidental success at a certain instant. But to talk about its prolonged period, its impact can never be long-lasting. Brands with personality win customers, clones never do.

Quality is the king. Brand personality is no less!

Today, content marketing is fully driven by a brand’s ability to create high utility content. Parallely, another part of the brand experience is companies going for their own online personality creation. In other words, the content types and subject matters are free to vary from company to company. And no two companies are supposed to be same while implementing content marketing strategies.

To think about it, no two companies are actually the same. They differ in a number of ways – each have their own stories, culture, motto, set of visions and objectives. So, it is quite unfair to expect a single strategy to work for more than one company.

The type of clone that binds both the companies as one doesn’t make sense. And ofcourse, neither do they show positive and effective results. What it does is nothing but kills people’s faith in content marketing.

Sadly enough, marketers often miss out the whole purpose of content which is nothing but to convey a brand’s values, messages, and actions. In other words, it is to present a brand’s personality with a sole aim to its target audience.

Creating your own content marketing strategy

If you think you want to be a successful company that has a distinct strategy, you ought to invest in a content marketing strategy that is successful and efficient for the long run. Without a proper strategy, success or failure is just a matter of luck, and who knows, all your efforts might simply go to waste.

There has to be specific flow of an effective content strategy and that must include these few steps:

1. Mission and Goals To Be Set Clearly

If you are looking for a realistic and practical content strategy plan, set out a content marketing mission statement. This is a brief statement which eases to focus on the important parts of content creation so that the entire marketing strategy stays on track. A content marketing mission statement includes your target audience, the content needed to reach them, and the benefit they would get.

At the same time the business goals must include details about improving revenue, tips to make more sales, getting more traffic, SEO success, and impressive social media involvement.

2. Establish distinct KPIs

Start by making your goals that are specific and measurable. In other words, set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your content marketing strategy. The KPIs help to let you know whether or not you have achieved your goals by providing milestones you can check off. These will include whatever you plan to achieve in terms of revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, traffic and different aspects of digital marketing like email marketing and social media metrics.

3. Know your audience

For a successful content marketing strategy, you need to be sure about your audience so that you can create the right content to reach them. There are three actions you need to take. Start by collecting demographic data that includes (age, gender, education, income), followed by getting customer feedback to get an insights into how they feel about your content, their urgent needs, and a problem solving approach to their problems. Up next is to create buyer personas, which is done by having a better understanding of the kind of content your audience will respond to, how it will help them, and what will make them care about it.

4. Assess your current position

Many businesses already have content out there which includes content that’s on your blog, as well as social media content, podcasts, videos, and so on. Hence, it is essential to figure out whether that content is helping you to meet your goals.

5. Figure out the best content channels

Working through the process, up next to find out where your audience stands, and where you already have a successful online presence. It is advisable to begin and focus on what’s working and expand from there, rather than try to do everything at once. And how to be sure of it? By taking a definite look at web analytics. When you are accessing Google Analytics, go to Acquisition to Social to Overview to see the main social networks and that is where your content is being shared.

You can check:

• Shares by network
• Shares by content type
• Shares by content length
• Top content in the past year

6. Decide on Content Types

Do make sure to focus on the types of content you need to create. There are certain content types that every content marketing strategy will include. Most successful content marketing strategies rely on having a central core of content published on the home site which can then be outposted, repurposed and shared on other sites.

7. Identify and allocate resources

Once the type of content to be created is finalized, followed by who it’s for, and where you’re planning to share it, it’s important to make sure you have everything you need to deliver on your content marketing strategy. Here, you must be able to answer things like:

• In charge of producing and maintaining content
• What human, physical or digital tools and resources do you need to create the content?
• What will your publishing workflow look like? And that includes content scheduling?

8. Create a content calendar

A major part of content strategy is to know exactly when you want to publish your content and on which platforms. Additionally, it is specifically required to know when to publish content on each of the platforms you want to use.

A major mistake in content marketing is the lack of planning. So, using a content calendar is crucial to get all your content scheduled. You can very well start off with Google calendar and simply put the due dates for each piece of content there. That works pretty well, especially if you’re not publishing a lot of content.

This is the simplest one, but works only till a certain limitation of content. Once that goes up, when you have to manage a content team and the production workflow you have decided on, then you are likely to look for some more features.

9. Content creation

Well, till now all the prep works have been done. And now it’s the turn of creation an actual piece of content. Do your research to have an idea of what type of blog post to create. Move on to pick a title from the content calendar and start working on it. You need to figure out what’s already out there, and how your content can add extra value for your audience.

Use the skyscraper technique to check out the top content for your topic, and to see how you can improve on it.

10. Distribute and market

Up next on your part of content strategy is distribution and marketing. That’s because you won’t get the results you want unless these are handled correctly. There are several tools that are used to promote your content, both on your site and via your email newsletter.

11. Result measuring and accessing your effort

The final step is to assess the success of your content marketing strategy. Here you need to go back to the KPIs that were set at the beginning of the content strategy plan, and find out what’s changed and whether you’re hitting your targets.

For this, the steps taken are:

• Check Google Analytics to see how the specific content is performing.
• Measure social sharing activity via several social analytics tools.
• Analyze at conversion analytics dashboard to assess the success of your marketing campaigns

Well, we come to our conclusion why and how one content marketing strategy can’t be one-size-fits-all for all. And we did place our logic to prove our points and how to work on unique content marketing idea.

Any professional digital marketing company would emphasis on these points. Carney Technologies Services is a pioneer among them. Get in touch with them on https://www.carneytechnologies.com/ or at +91-9163298336 to know further on the same.