Unless you’re brand new to the internet, you’re probably already aware that content marketing is the weapon of choice among businesses with an online presence. Broadly put, the term refers to the distribution of helpful online content to boost customer interaction and increase profits.
However, while creating material for your website or social media channels may sound simple, getting it right can be a difficult, complicated process. In fact, the ugly truth is that many companies fail at content marketing.
According to a study, 66% of B2C brands surveyed reported failure with their content marketing efforts.
Without the proper investment of time and money, mistakes are easy to make. Dormant Facebook feeds, poorly written blogs, website copy that’s not optimized for SEO – these are just a few common signs of unsuccessful content. Whether you’re an enterprise level corporation or small business, every brand needs a thorough strategy behind their content.
To help focus your efforts, here are 9 lessons I've personally learned from my experience working on content marketing plans.
Understand your audience
[tweet_box design=”box_10″]With any form of marketing, you need to understand your audience before advertising to it.[/tweet_box] What’s the age range and gender of your demographics? What are their interests? What do they want to read, see or watch?
Research is the cornerstone to all of your subsequent efforts. Once you can answer the fundamental questions about your audience, start creating a plan. In addition to general info, pay attention to its online behavior. For example, are people drawn to video, or do they prefer text? Implement your content and watch how users engage with it. Optimize as you go, replicating the types of posts that perform well, and nixing the ones that sink to the bottom of the internet.
Hire professionals
For one reason or another, many companies assume that content marketing is only a part-time task, or that it’s something to be done by interns. While the allocation of marketing budgets may prevent you from spending as much time as you’d like on your content, brands should understand that digital marketing will only be successful under the guidance of experienced, paid professionals. And even then you need to do your homework and be selective.
Figure out exactly what you want to accomplish from your content (brand awareness, more conversions on your website, sales, etc.), and hire someone who can demonstrate accomplishments in these particular areas. Don’t just hire someone who’s “good at Facebook”, and expect big ROI.
Emphasize benefits over features
The age-old rule of advertising applies to online marketing as well: your content should emphasize benefits over features. (An exception might be made for, say, a B2B company with technical software; the complex features may require just as much explanation as their benefits).
This is your opportunity to think big. Sure, your discount jewelry store may provide pendants at a lower price than your competitors, but how does your offering enrich people’s lives? Nike advertises their gear of course, but much of their content marketing is centered around achieving greatness, and pushing yourself to go farther than you thought possible.
By contrast, poor content marketing is dry and purely informational. You don’t just want to inform people about why your product or service is great, you want to use it as a launch point to inspire them.
Create a community
Content marketing is a great opportunity to tell your brand’s story to the world. Brand storytelling is a way for a company to add a little personality and show a face to its business. By using it, you give customers a human element with which they can relate.
Whether you post blogs in the voice of your brand, or create a social media presence demonstrating your business’ personality, unique, personalized content offers something to people other than traditional, canned marketing. It allows customers to participate in your brand.
For example, Ben & Jerry’s created an instagram campaign around the theme of “euphoric” experiences (not necessarily limited to ice cream). The company asked its followers to post pics documenting extremely awesome moments with the hashtag #CaptureEuphoria, and the highlights were then featured in official ads.
The outreach transcended fans’ love of ice cream, and united them around a bigger human experience. In turn, Ben & Jerry’s created a compelling and unique story about its values.
Headlines are everything
Because there’s a seemingly infinite volume of content online, yours needs to be scannable. Copy should be succinct and valuable (entertaining doesn’t hurt either, if appropriate). This all starts with your headline. Think about your own scrolling habits. Do you stop to read every single article in your RSS or Facebook feeds? Most likely what gets you to pause is a catchy headline.
But as anyone who’s ever tried to write a headline can tell you, it’s not easy. In fact, they’re a bit of an art form, which is why journalists work tirelessly to perfect them. Ideally, your headline should boil your topic down its nut, and clearly state the stakes involved. If you’re struggling to nail it, try writing a headline 20 different ways. It’ll force you to get increasingly creative and eventually you’ll stumble on that magic combination of words that will greatly improve your chances of a click.
The reality is that, without a well-worded headline, your content won’t be read, no matter good it is. If you’re trying to clamor for attention online, avoid boring, long, or overly complicated headlines.
Include evergreen content
Content online can generally be separated into 2 categories: topical and evergreen. Being topical is a great way to join the conversation online about current events or trends. It may also earn you a short-term spike in traffic, which shouldn’t be discounted.
However, evergreen content pays off nicely over time. Typically this category addresses people’s ongoing, broad needs. Rather than being limited to a trending topic, it’s always relevant. To get meta for a moment, an article on tips for improving your content marketing is evergreen, as content marketing has been an important topic for several years and doesn’t look to be losing steam any time soon (whether or not anyone wants to read this particular article, however, remains to be seen).
Evergreen content also has the added benefit of providing sources for future, related materials. You can re-purpose one blog, and re-contextualize the information for a separate post.
Engage
Perhaps the most common mistake companies make with their social media accounts is failing to engage with its audience. Whether you’re running a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or other page, people expect you to not just post relevant content, but to follow up as well.
Best practices dictate that community managers respond to people who engage with your content. In particular, thanking people who leave favorable comments is a great way to show that you appreciate them. Social media is ideal for customer service, so you always want to put your best face forward, and encourage responses around your content.
Offer value
Promotional content is important. After all, you’re running a business, and your products and services aren’t going to advertise themselves. However, online audiences tend to be allergic to too much self-promotion. Over posting about your business in social media, or sending too many promo newsletters will result in a steady decline of followers and subscribers.
Instead, the bulk of your content should provide value. Again, this goes back to the fundamental questions of what your audience wants to read, see and watch. In digital marketing, customers, not brands, drive interaction, so you want to give them information or an experience that’s relevant or useful to them. If you can prove yourself with valuable content, customers are more likely to invest in you.
Track your content
Creating compelling, useful content is crucial. Without it, your whole strategy will collapse. However, even the most incredible copy in the world is fairly useless if you just dump it online, and don’t monitor it. You need to track the performance of every post, see what’s faring well versus what’s dying, and determine if your conversion goals are being met. Conversions simply refer to desired actions that you want people to take (clicks, downloads, sales, etc.), and almost always result from the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.
It’s important to remember here that you probably won’t win big right out of the gate. Because content marketing is relatively new, there are no iron-clad strategies. But tracking your efforts will allow you to tweak your strategy, and bring you closer to your goals.
Recommended Reading
- Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less
- Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
- Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype
Stephen, my observation about the evergreen vs topical content is that it is difficult for an evergreen content to bring huge numbers of traffic to my site as compared to a short term/ medium term blog post (in general). So I use a mix of both. But you are absolutely right that the spikes can disappear once the short term blog post has lost its shine.
The trouble with evergreen content is that the blogosphere is saturated with this kind of content. The expectations and the standards are extremely high and you have to be ultra-smart to make the cut. Harsh reality but this is what a new blogger faces in the real world. Be the best or join the rest…
Nice article with some solid advice. Cheers.
Hi Ahmad,
There’s no doubt when you say that evergreen content has high expectations, but if one can learn to deliver on the standards of the evergreen content, it could gain you actual benefits.
While for a newcomer, adapting to such standards could take time, he may likely to opt for the topical content, which seems much easier. However, riding on the topical content only results into short-term spikes in terms of traffic. But then looking at the added benefits of the evergreen content, one should select both types of content, based on suitability and requirements.
Stephen, you said the right..! Content Marketing is more selling article, but it is best way to build loyalty readers, and prospective customers. I mean you have to build brand reputation.
Actually, I have read a lot of blog posts about content marketing techniques and it mistakes. However, the most I love is yours, honestly.
I agree with what you mentioned in above article. The most important fact about content marketing is to understand about audience. Sure, they are our customers thus we need to learn about them.
You know..? Some business person told me that “You have to put your head under your customers’ shoes”, it means that you have to know about what your audience want, and where they are going to..
You have to learn about this faster than your competitors, before they’re going to do it for you.
The most valuable you mentioned is hiring expertise, or professional marketers to do it you. Of course, it is absolutely right..!
Today is not like yesterday…the traditional content marketing is gone. You have to find more creative for doing your business. If you’re not able to do it yourself, you have to hire some to do it for you.
Business is to use money for making money…
Another, tips you have mention in the article is really pretty ideas about content marketing.. I l really love it.
Hi Kimsea,
I am glad that you found the article useful. Figuring out what you want to achieve through your content marketing strategies and understanding your target audience are two very important aspects.
There is absolutely no place for weak content, duplicate content or unnecessarily lengthy blogs which serve no purpose even for the SEO than to merely fill up web pages in the digital space. You just cannot entertain today’s fastidious audience with poorly written content.
For all such reasons, I always recommend to seek professionals’ help for preparing content and publishing it. Unless you very well understand what your audience is looking for and delivering up to their expectations is quite significant.
Engage. That might be the best advice in this article. So many times I visit blogs and see posts that have comments with no response from the blog owner.
Now on bigger blogs I understand that they can not respond to every single comment, but showing that you respond to most goes a long ways.
Even though my blog is small (growing fast though) I have seen incredible growth just from engaging with my readers. From responding to tweets and comments, to responding to their emails. I have created a bunch of fans very quickly!
Chris
Hi Chris,
I liked your observation. It is in fact wonderful to engage with readers. Getting connected with your readers or audience is necessary for devising further content strategies. Not only that, this way also gives insights into what your readers look for when they visit your blog. Tweets, comments and email replies are some of the great ways to engage with your audience. It’s good to know that you are making every effort to keep in touch with your fans.
“Understand your audience” This is really true. Before you make any content you need to understand and know your audience. That’s the whole point of planning for content marketing. I hope more readers can benefit from your tips.
Hi Leo,
You’re absolutely right. Understanding your audience should be the first priority. This can help in delivering the right kind of content for your target audience. Most successful content marketing strategies are based on this reality.
Very good list here. I agree with all. My favorite is “Create a community”. I think creating your own community or following is the most important. If you are able to create a community you have done most things well. It is kind of the proof that you have done the right things. When you have successfully built a community you will be in control of your own destiny.
Hi George,
As I have written in the article too that content marketing is a great opportunity to tell your brand’s story to the world, you must reach out to the large audience who’s there and tap it. A simple human experience can help make your brand big. Storytelling, personalized content and social media engagement are all very important for giving a face to your brand and business. The more earnest and heartfelt your content is, the more chance you have to connect with your people online.
Engaging the customer That might be the best advice in this article.
Now on bigger blogs I understand that they can not respond to every single comment, but showing that you respond to most goes a long ways.
User engagement is important, I agree – I finally found someone who understands the importance. But, unfortunately, it is hard to measure because a “like” doesn’t signalize engagement since it only takes you one second to do it. A comment or backlink in comparison shows whether somebody is interested enough to sit down and spend a minute or two on thinking about it and e.g. writing down his thoughts. I would describe the effect on people as Impact, it influences them on a longer term. Measuring the impact has been difficult though, so I developed a tool for this particular purpose (and also more), it is called Impactana. It would be great if you had a look.
Great article! Yes it is true that understanding your audience is one of the most important key for your success. And having an evergreen content is also a good strategy, though not at all times.