The customer is always right. This well-known saying should be heeded by marketers the world over – ourselves included – but particularly by those focussing on content marketing.
In order to generate a successful strategy, you have to consider the consumer at the start, middle and end of a campaign – no exceptions.
Centring a strategy on them from the beginning to the end, no matter what channel the strategy is implemented on, is the best advice we can give you.To achieve this, you must first know your customers; who they are and what demographic they fall into, as well as their age, gender and marital status. By using such profiles, you can better assess their needs and interests. You can generate such profiles by using various analytics tools or by investing in a targeted survey. You’d be surprised how much value can be found in the answers to simple questions like “what brands do you interact with on social media?” – obvious questions like these can be a great help when determining what matters to your audience.After this, we recommend you align this knowledge with your business goals – after all, your content marketing strategy is just a tool to help you achieve better business results. All content should have an objective; these may vary from raising brand awareness and provoking user engagement to simply trying to gain more web traffic. Needless to say, the content must be suitable for matching these objectives. When creating content, you should be aware of current events happening around you.
Real-time “news jacking”
A tactic known as “news jacking” has become a popular way to engage your customers. For example, sending a tweet, talking, making comments or sharing jokes about popular TV shows you know your target audience is watching can deliver impressive results – just make sure you are always ready to post at the opportune moment. Having mentioned tweets, we should probably mention that content which works for Twitter doesn’t necessarily translate as well on Facebook, and vice versa.You must always make the effort to pick the right channel for your content; Twitter is ideal for short, attention-grabbing messages, and tweets often benefits from a pinch of humour. Facebook is where you have more room to share content and where most engagement originates, while your blog should be the platform where you put longer, deeper content (but you can often benefit from sharing your blog posts across all available channels). Once you’ve been doing this for a while, you’ll have gathered enough data about user engagement to create some in-depth analysis.
Analyse everything
If you’ve made a post meant to raise brand awareness and it didn’t get many shares, ask yourself: why did it fail? If it succeeded, determine what it was that hooked people. With content, it’s usually trial and error, but you have to follow the results to determine once and for all what works and what doesn’t. If this all sounds a bit daunting (we know it can take a while to determine the best channels for specific posts) then we can help. Having a number of years of expertise in the content marketing industry we are well aware of the different channels available and what works best on each.