Content marketing is when you produce content (articles, images, videos, podcasts, white papers, info graphics, blog posts, books etc) or earn coverage that is tied to your brand, and distributed in such a way that it positions you well in the mind of your target consumer, and over time it causes them to do business with you.
Think of it as a slow boil.
Here are 5 tips to becoming more effective at using content marketing as a strategy.
1. Know your audience. Who do you serve? You need to know whom you are speaking to, because that will drive both the message and content as well as the media choices. Is it B2B or B2C? Think demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioural profiles.
2. What are their needs? This will drive the content. If you’re selling cosmetics to teen girls you might produce videos about how to apply eyeliner. If you’re a realtor you might show before and after staging photos to sell a home. If you’re a landscaper, you might share helpful spring pruning tips. You get the idea. Content marketing should be valuable to your target audience.
3. Where do they hang out? This will drive your media choices. To a certain extent some of your choices for producing useful content will drive your media used, but this step needs to be purposeful. I suggest you consider what combination of owned, rented, earned, embedded and paid media will work best. If you want to learn more about these concepts, link here. Essentially you want to think strategically about what platforms are going to have the greatest clout with your target audience. For my particular audience it is a combination of an enewsletter, blog and several published books (owned), LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (rented), news features such as CBC, BC Business (earned), writing articles for publications Huffington Post and Business in Vancouver (embedded), and strategically boosting Facebook posts and Google ad words, as well as traditional direct mail (paid).
4. Outline your content and media-planning calendar. Once you know who your audience is, what they need, and where they hang out, it’s then a matter of mapping it all. This is where you can refine it even more. Perhaps they need certain content at particular times of the year. Diarize a cycle that you will contact media with an earned media pitch. I readily admit to having a plan and then deviating from it sometimes. I think you need the flexibility to respond to timely events that may be of interest to your audience. Ditto when pitching media.
5. Manage your time. I diarize days and time to write weekly, since that is my primary content marketing tool. What you do will vary. I also suggest diarizing when you will post content to social platforms. Tools like Hootsuite are great for helping you schedule time released content all in one go. I set my stuff up weekly and then leave it alone. Social media can be a huge time waster. I suggest focusing only on those platforms that really matter to your audience, and use scheduling and dashboard management tools to minimize the time to set it all up and monitor it. It can take time to contact media pitching an idea, but the resulting coverage if earned, can be very valuable. This is especially true once you re-purpose it through your other owned and rented channels.
Of course you might have a few other ideas to add. Feel free to comment if you’ve found something particularly effective!
